Ice
by Farla
Summary: The story of an unusual, inhuman girl. Chapter Sixteen: Kind
1. Early Childhood

Early Childhood

-

"Damn vermin!" The man kicked it, hard, then walked away.

The child crawled over. She stared at it, entranced by the brilliant scarlet color of the blood, glistening like wet rubies in the dim light, and the shiny round black eyes staring outward, devoid of any emotion. She crawled closer, hanging over it. She had only seen the flash of tails and hind legs before, vanishing like the end of a worm sucked into the beak of a spearow. Yet they were going to safety, while the worm was going to die. She didn't understand exactly how it could work differently.

She knew this one was hurt badly, that it was broken. She did not know, exactly, what it looked like normally, but she did know that its body looked wrong somehow. As she sat watching it, she became aware of small noises around her, scrabblings she recognized and had heard many times before, although she could not remember the first time.

"Hello," she said, not moving, still staring at the twitching rattata. "Hello. Is this yours?" She tried again, twisting at her voice, trying to find the sound they would react to. "One of yours? Is this one of yours?"

One of them, only one, chittered at her, angry but something else too, more that than angry, something else she didn't know.

"I didn't," she said, not so much a denial as a simple statement. Her voice was still twisting.

Chittering, more than one this time. Not warning, not danger, just...what? She didn't know what it meant.

"I think it's going to die," she continued, conversationally, trying to get the pitch and rhythm right. "I'm not sure. Is it? I'd think you'd know."

More chittering, purposeful. She listened, repeating the sounds over and over in her head.

...dying...something about that. The rattata was dying. But not an answer to the question, a...something. She...something angry, only not exactly anger. Over...the rattata...dying? No, no, not...quite.

It was hard to tell, not a matter of only hearing a few words but of half-hearing them all. She felt frustrated. She sat back, turned her head from side to side, trying to understand it.

The other rattata was saying – why she...killed it? No. Why she...didn't kill it?

"What?" she asked, trying to imitate the rhythm of the sounds. It chittered again.

Why she didn't kill it? No. Why had she and then not? No. Why she had...no. Why it was still alive? No. Why it was still alive when she had killed it?

The hidden rattata chittered a third time, almost the same yet different, subtly. Almost a demand.

Why she didn't kill it after she killed it? No, not quite, not at all. Why she...it...

She reached out and snapped the neck of the injured rattata, breaking it like a dry twig between her fingers. Why had she killed it and not let it die.

Silence, silence. She didn't know what they were doing or about to do, and she couldn't see them, because they wouldn't venture out even in darkness. But – and this was something strange, something rare – she didn't feel like they were, or could be, anything dangerous to her.

-

She didn't consider the man her father. She thought he might be, because _he_ seemed to think so. But that had nothing to do with it.

The man was dully colored, or perhaps she thought that because his personality overflowed into her physical perception of him. Brown hair, brown eyes, just brown, without any further description necessary or even possible. He didn't look bland to her, that be would familiarity.

The man was reasonably peaceful, big enough to kill her in one blow. She thought of him as big, hulking, clumsy, and brown, like the picture of a creature called ursaring she had seen once.

They didn't look much alike, she knew that much. She thought they must not have been very different, either. She knew that as children got older, they began to show how much or little they would resemble the people they lived with. She also knew that bad things happened to children who didn't look enough like their fathers, and that was another reason she tried to stay out of sight.

She was aware he might have tolerated her anyway, for some unknown reason. But being uncertain of exactly where she stood, she chose not to press the issue.

-

The man who considered himself to be her father had a job of some sort, she was unsure of what. She only knew that there must have been some reason for it, because five days out of seven he would get up and leave the house with swollen eyes, which was something he didn't seem to want to do.

Once he left, she would go to sleep. She didn't like mornings, which were generally colder and brighter than she wanted, and she didn't want to sleep when he was around. When she woke up, in the afternoon, she would search the house, carefully picking though whatever food he had bought. She preferred things in plastic wrappers. She didn't like the taste of them, hated the taste, but they were less easily missed then bigger things, lasted longer and were possible for a child to open. She would hide them.

The man who considered himself her father did not seem to mind the food disappearing. Either that or he didn't notice. She wasn't entirely sure which it was, nor was she interested in finding out.

Back when she was younger, she had not eaten on days when the man was home or had forgotten to buy food. She didn't want him to see her eating, because she didn't want to remind him, and she didn't want him to see her taking the food either.

Sometimes, there were only cans, and then she would have trouble. The can opener was big, heavy, and dull. Many of the cans only had marks, not pictures, and those marks would be different even for the same kind of food, so she couldn't tell what was inside. And she wasn't able to bring the can opener elsewhere to eat, because that would be obvious.

More then a year ago, less then two, she had tried opening a can herself. She did manage, in the end, to break the top off and eat the cloying, syrup-coated fruit inside, but had gotten the juice all over herself and had to soak herself in frigid water to get rid of it.

She had gotten a cough afterward, causing her have to bite the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from making a sound at the wrong moment, filling her mouth with blood. She had also shivered constantly, and hadn't dared to go outside because it was suddenly too cold. The entire thing had been so unpleasant that she hadn't tried again.

Her situation was not ideal, but she did not know of anything better. She had only a limited understanding of where food came from. She avoided other children, who were unpredictable and usually bigger than she was, and she avoided adults, who were dangerous and always bigger than her. So she stayed.

-

There was someone banging at the door.

The man was not going to answer it. She knew that much. He was in another room and there was noise there, and he wouldn't hear it.

The banging was louder. If it kept getting louder or the banger started yelling, then the man would answer it, and he would be angry. And if he couldn't yell at the person he might remember she was there.

So the child opened the door.

There was an angular, unpleasant woman there, who stared at the child. The child took a step back, retreating into the dimmer light. The woman was wearing gray clothing, which were crisp, creased and strange. Her face looked as if it had been carved out of wood, seemingly made up of nothing but sharp lines and flat planes.

The woman spoke. "Where's your father?"

The child stood there silently. She wanted the woman to go away. She didn't want to say anything because she didn't know what she was supposed to say, or how she was supposed to say it.

"Well?"

The child opened her mouth to answer, but something in the woman's expression made her close it. She didn't want to stand there in front of an adult, but she didn't want to get the man either. She knew he would be angry if she got him, and he might not be able to just yell at the person and so he'd stay angry and be mad at her.

The woman shifted slightly, as if she was about to step forward. The child shrank back again. She didn't want the woman to be near her. The woman stepped onto the sagging doorframe.

The child continued to back away until she was certain the woman couldn't see her in the gloom. There were no lights on in the hallway, and the woman was blocking the light coming in from the door. The girl flattened against the side of the wall.

"Hello?" said the woman. Then louder: "Hello! Is anyone here!"

The child heard a squeaking, groaning sound, and knew the man must have gotten up. She wondered if it would have been better to get him herself. She didn't think so.

She heard the door to the hallway opening, and wondered if the woman could as well. But the stranger didn't look toward the sound, so she didn't think so.

The child then heard the faint sound of fingers on the wall, and realized the man was reaching for the light switch. She hadn't realized that would happen; she could see just fine, and he rarely turned on the hallway lights. She darted to the end of the hallway as the uncovered lightbulb flickered once before glowing steadily.

Her eyes avoided the white shine automatically. The child knew that if she looked at it she wouldn't be able to see anything, although she couldn't remember doing so.

"Was that your daughter?" asked the woman, sounding annoyed. Her voice was as sharp as her clothing and face. "Is your daughter here?"

The man grunted something. It was agreement, that was clear from the tone, even if it wasn't based on a word. The child understood that, but the woman seemed not to.

"What did you say?" she said.

"Yah," he mumbled thickly, looking like he was trying to get the woman into focus. He was swaying slightly on his feet.

"Then why wasn't she in school?"

The man's face changed suddenly, to settle midway between anger and – something. "What doya know about it?"

"You put her on your taxes, that means she exists. So we notice if she doesn't show up for school. It's the law."

Which the woman did not really care about. She was supposed to do this, and didn't want to. Like the man. She didn't want to be there, this was wasting her time, and she wanted to finish as quickly as possible. The child could understand this.

The child could not, however, understand what was going on. She didn't know any of the things the woman was talking about. The only bit she was able to pick up was that somehow these things had to do with her, with someone she didn't know knowing about her and paying attention to her.

She didn't like that. Slipping slightly into the light she opened a door and left the two behind. She looked over her shoulder as she did so to check to see if they had noticed her – normally she would have been sure they hadn't, but now she wasn't sure. Feeling safer in the windowless room, she sat down in the darkest corner and waited.

-

The woman had left, and the man slouched back down on the couch. She waited patently as he stared at the indecipherable squiggles glowing on the side of the black rectangle facing him. Finally she heard him shift, fumbling for the smaller, flat black rectangle resting on the arm nearest to him. He pushed it, and the sound snapped off. The room was still filled with the pulsing glow, threatening but not delivering noise.

She stepped forward, separating from the shadows on the wall, stepping into the faintly flickering light. "Daddy?" she said, keeping her voice soft, slightly uncertain. She'd found he was less likely to be angry when she asked in this voice.

He looked up, his face showing something she didn't understand. It was the way he usually looked at her, which wasn't something that happened often. He didn't answer.

"What was the woman saying?" she pressed. "Why was she here?" She still kept her voice soft, not adding the urgency that would have encouraged an answer. She took care to make her question innocent. It was because of her the woman had come, and whatever he had to do because of that was because of her as well.

He mumbled, loud and slurred, the opposite of her quiet, clear voice. "Whadiyateller?" There was the faint, faint hint of anger, and she paused a moment to decide if there was any real anger being directed at her, or any sullen embers waiting to flair up.

"I didn't say anything. I didn't tell anything," she denied, mindful not to sound as if she was denying anything.

He muttered to himself wordlessly.

She was unsure what to do next. She would prefer to stop talking, yet, she would have preferred not to have started talking to begin with, and she'd prefer more not to attract the odd woman's further attention. She hadn't liked being in the undivided attention of an adult. But repeating herself would increase the likelihood of annoying him, and if he had no reason to help her now, he would have less reason to help her if she annoyed him. She didn't know how much he tolerated her, where the line was drawn. So she waited.

He mumbled something, not words or things that were meant to be words, then moved off for whatever purpose he had. She waited a bit longer to make sure he wouldn't be returning, then stepped out of the light again to curl up in a corner where she couldn't be seen. She didn't want to be found if someone was looking for her. Who she didn't know exactly, everyone.

-

The next day, a hazy day where even the sunlight seemed dingy, something was different. When her father woke up he had looked for her, and despite the fact she didn't know exactly what he wanted, she'd shown herself, because he wasn't drunk and couldn't be counted on not to remember this later.

He hadn't said anything to her, just acknowledged her appearance, grabbed her by the arm, and started walking. She wasn't sure what to do, so she followed without making him pull her. She wouldn't be able to get away until he let go, so there was no point in making him hold tighter.

They ended up at a building which might have looked run-down in a different neighborhood, but which fit neatly into its surroundings. It was red, something she noticed almost with a sense of awe. Dingy red, dusty and faded, but standing out like a flame in comparison to the surrounding buildings.

She was pushed in, money shoved into one hand as she was exchanged and grabbed by someone else. She wanted to run, back away and regard the situation until she understood it, but the new person's grip was as firm as the man's and she knew better than to try and fail. If something did happen, and she did have to get away, she would have a better chance if the grip loosened and it wouldn't if she was fighting. And fighting drew attention.

A door opened, she was shoved through, and finally no one was holding onto her. But the room was bright, lit from the inside and outside, and there were dozens of eyes all staring at her, pinning her in place. She didn't want to do anything they weren't expecting, not move, not breathe.

"Hello," said the teacher. She felt an unpleasant hum of falsehood. "This is a new student," he told the class.

His words died right as they reached the other children's ears. The children regarded her with slight interest, something almost enough to make her bolt, yet they were nearly as much strangers here as she was.

The teacher pointed to a seat, and she mutely traveled there and sat. She tried to shrink down, to hide in their sight. There she watched them without looking like she was watching them.

The class began. The teacher spoke, the children spoke. She looked around and tried to see which ones there no one looked at, which ones others did look at.

She watched them. When the day ended and the children left, she returned to the house and hid in a corner to sleep. And then next day she had to return. And the next.

The other children learned songs and rhyming verses, simple things that were easy to remember. They were taught to think of a mark on paper as a sound, to make that sound when they saw it. They were taught to think of other marks as words, then things, things that could change depending on what happened or how they were arranged.

She learned how to blend in instead of disappear.

She remembered what she was told, especially because she was not being addressed as an individual, only a group. If someone had been telling her this, she would have been distracted by trying to figure out what they meant for her to do, why they were telling her this, how she was supposed to respond, and what she needed to do for them to leave her alone.

So, while the teacher worked with those who didn't understand, she watched the other children stumble and stammer, saw the teacher saying things over and over again, sometimes patiently, sometimes not. She learned to imitate the way the others talked, their jerky, uncertain way of abandoning half-finished sentences to start over, of repeating words or phrases, of lisping and not pronouncing the words.

She still preferred not to speak, however well she could blend her voice into the same unremarkable tone and pattern. She tried to look like the other children who the teacher didn't pay attention to, not someone who would cause trouble. Someone to be completely ignored, someone who was not noticed. She was not called on, not talked to by the teacher.

That was the first month.

She did not like it. Morning and early afternoon were the times she used to sleep. She had no problem adjusting when she slept and when she was awake, but she didn't want to adjust.

The best part of the day was recess. The same was true for all of the children save the quailing weaklings who got beaten every time they were released from the lazy eye of the teacher. She didn't like it either, but she hated it less.

On the first day, she had spent her time off to the side, warily watching the others. She had noticed they also seemed slightly uncertain, something that faded away like morning mist as time passed.

The other children did not seem to know what to make of her. They suspected, slightly, that there was something strange about her, but that was all. Just enough to make them avoid her. She, after all, didn't know much more than that, so it was hard to believe they could.

She was suspicious at first. Many of them – almost all of them – were bigger then she was. But as she watched them, she found them to be flighty, easily distracted, and unable to work together. They were minor threat, but not a major one, not one she needed to watch. Without anyone to direct them, she wasn't in much danger.

At the time, the idea of trying to direct them herself was completely alien to her. Even if it had occurred to her, there was nothing she would have thought to make them do.

Having decided that she didn't need to watch them always, and not someone who played games, she decided to sleep. Even minor threats, though, were dangerous if she was asleep. Most of them were loud and clumsy and lacked the subtlety to do anything, but one or two might manage it. So she had to find a safe place first.

There were several trees in the playground, and one was by the edge of the school. All had the lower branches chopped off, preventing children from climbing them, so she climbed the side of the school instead, walked along the roof and jumped onto one of the upper branches that was nearest to the building. Then, with thick leaves between her and the sun and with solid branches between her and eyes on the ground, she slept fitfully, waking halfway at each new noise from below until she finally woke up completely to the hated sound of the bell that signaled the end of the time outside. The bell made a noise that was too loud and high-pitched, and with a sort of humming sound underneath that comes from old, dust-filled things no one bothers to clean. She didn't like being there, she didn't like being awake, and she didn't like the noises.

What she did might have seemed noticeable, odd, unusual, but there were no adults to count and notice one missing, she had no friends to wonder where she went, and she moved quickly and watched for watchers so that no one saw the act itself. Had she realized how strange it was, she would not have done so. When jumping down, she went to the far side once the other children had started to travel in at the bell, because she didn't want to attract their attention with sudden movement, not realizing how surprised they would have been by the act itself.

It was the spearow that changed all that.

-

She slept very lightly, so that when the spearow landed she woke. There was an element of luck in it as well. The new, soft sound of feathered wings might not have woken her up, but it could have, and did.

"Hello," she had said. "Hello, hello."

The spearow looked surprised. After a moment, it trilled something. She repeated the sound, unable to understand the meaning but hearing it all the same. She liked the way it sounded, clear and truthful.

The spearow cocked its head at her, seeming confused. It fluffed its feathers and jumped nervously, not sure if it should fly. It was well away from her, on the end of the branch where it was narrow and she wouldn't climb.

She repeated the sound it made again. "Hello," she added, trying to blend the sounds together. The spearow only looked more confused. It made a different sound, which she repeated back to it.

It went into a volley of whistles and chirps. When it stopped, she started repeating them as best she could.

"Hey!" shouted someone below them. "Look! It's a spearow!"

Someone threw a stone. It clipped the side of the spearow, who let out a startled screech and fell. It flapped its wings but seemed lopsided suddenly, and ended up on the ground. The other children gathered around it, so she jumped down, as confused as the spearow had been over this odd turn of events.

Their attention was on the spearow, so no one saw her leave the tree. There was an element of luck in that as well.

She moved quickly over to the circle. She wanted to see what was happening. One of them had reached out and grabbed the spearow, maybe the same one that threw the rock. He was laughing triumphantly, holding it by the wings, pulling them apart. The spearow was shrieking and thrashing but couldn't reach him with its talons or beak. He was still pulling, hard. It looked like he meant to pull both wings off.

She acted on a whim, pulling loose from the edge of the circle and reaching out, grabbing the spearow's wings over his fingers. She dug her nails in, drawing blood and causing him to yelp and pull back. She caught the spearow, quickly shifting her grip so she was holding the legs in one hand and the neck in the other.

"What the hell's your problem!" yelled the boy, sucking on his bleeding fingers. "What the hell did you do that for? It's not like it's yours! Stupid!"

She considered the spearow in her hands, looking down at it solemnly. "Mine," she said after a moment. "It's mine."

"Liar! It was up in the tree! Everyone saw it! I hit it so it's mine!" he said, stepping forward.

She did the same, against all reason. She wanted to back away, but she'd seen this before, and that didn't work. So she did the opposite. "It's mine."

"Is not!" he yelled.

She switched the spearow to one hand, cupping it under its chest, freeing the other hand. It was too tired to struggle. "It _is_ mine," she said, the fingers of her free hand slightly curled, with blood on the tips.

"Fine!" he said defiantly, balling his fists. "It's yours. Gimme it or I'll hit you!"

She lunged, holding the spearow against her side while reaching out and clawing at his stomach, tearing off a long strip of cloth and skin. She was surprised when instead of hitting back he squealed, staring down at the bloody patch. It was a large but light wound, certainly painful, but nothing more. She understood that the stupid and weaker children didn't fight back, but he had hit them. She had thought he would fight back.

"Mine," she said. "This is mine. You can't have it."

He wasn't going to do anything else. Had he been willing to fight? Yes, he had, hadn't he? He had been ready to hit her. That didn't make sense. Surely it was more important to protect yourself when attacked.

The other children were watching. She didn't like that, especially how they were all behaving the same. She didn't want them acting together. But they didn't seem ready to act, so she walked away, to the far side of the tree. There was only a faint dimness there, but it was enough to make her feel better, and the trunk blocked the children's stares.

She opened her hand and dropped the bloody mess she had torn away from the boy, then set the spearow down. She held it by the neck with one of her hands and prodded at the bent wing with the other. It screeched at her again, a painfully high-pitched noise that the other children didn't seem to notice.

She wasn't really sure what to do with it. She had taken it because she had been interested in it. She hadn't really thought much about what she was going to do with it now.

The spearow pecked at the scrap of skin and cloth on the ground curiously, then chirped. After a pause, it chirped again, using the same sound. She repeated it. The spearow chirped a few times and trilled, then waited.

How had the rattata talked? The sounds weren't the same, but they were close. If the rattata had said that it would have meant...but she hadn't really understood the rattata, and she understood this even less.

The spearow was saying something about its wing, she understood that much. But then she could guess it would be talking about the wing, so that made it easier.

"Wing?" she asked. The spearow nodded, repeating the sounds a third time, and a fourth. Wing which was hurt meant need to...? Place, bring to, promise of...help? No, not, not quite. _It_ was promising to – help her? if brought to something.

The spearow repeated the same string of sound over and over again, just as the teacher did when the children didn't understand. She repeated back what it sounded like to her. She found it odd it understood her words, yet couldn't make them. And she found it odd she couldn't understand it even though it could understand her.

Finally, it seemed satisfied. The message was still garbled, but she could understand enough. The spearow wished to be taken to a place to fix its wing. This was very important. It was promising it would help her any way it could, for the rest of its life. It wouldn't stay, but if they ever met again, it would.

She really didn't care much about its promise. It sounded frantic, sounded…something. She had nothing she wanted to ask of it, so whether or not she met it again didn't matter, but she was curious what the place was. She didn't think the teacher would notice if she didn't come back in. He hadn't noticed she was missing yet, even though everyone had gone back into the squat red building.

She picked up the spearow and pulled a corner of the fence to the side, as she had seen older children do when they wanted to leave. She stepped through easily, being much smaller then those who normally used it.

"Where is the place?" she asked.

The spearow squawked and chirped rapidly. (something) thank you may (something) (something) (something) for (something) kindness equal of blessed (something).

"Where is the place?" she asked.

There wasn't one in this (something). In the last (something), it had seen the (something). It had (something) with the (something) sun on the (something). It didn't know if the (something) were in other places to the (something) or (something) because it had only seen (something) along its usual (something). It had been going (something) to (something) so it had gone in a (something) line because (something) so it hadn't been able to (something).

She listened to the chirps as she walked in the direction it had indicated. It happily repeated itself as they continued. The spearow explained there was a (something) going in the right direction but the distance was (something) because (something) when it (something) and so the time might be (something) or (something) or even (something). It had only taken it (something) because it (something) (something) while she (something).

She had never gone beyond the edge of the city before so she found the flatter, quieter world strange. The spearow continued chirping with occasional trills, talking about everything they saw and explaining what it was, its significance, where else it was, and what the spearow thought of it. She did not know why it did that.

She got to the next town after several hours. It was in better condition then the one she had come from, and there also seemed to be more people on the streets. There was more light, but there were still shadows on the walls, so she didn't care. The spearow stopped making sound except to make a quiet noise for left or right as she moved through the city. It had never actually gone though the roads like this, but it had flown over and it said it could figure out the way. It worked out the route in its head as they moved along. To the child, it seemed as if they were backtracking sometimes, or moving in opposite directions, but she didn't say anything. She didn't really care how long it took. Everything in this city was new to her.

The place she ended up at was lit with neon lights. She immediately disliked it. Walking in on the spearow's prompt, she found the inside even more brilliant than the outside, filled with people in bright colors talking and milling about in large groups. They didn't seem to notice her, which was the only positive thing about the place.. The spearow made the sound for moving forward, so she walked until the she came to a large counter. A woman even brighter than the surroundings was behind it. She didn't like the woman.

"Hello," said the woman cheerfully. "I haven't seen you before."

"I just got here," she said, holding up the spearow.

"Oh, what happened to that spearow?" asked the woman, taking it.

"Its wing is hurt," she said. "I have to go now."

"Thank you for bringing it. Did you parents tell you to?"

She shook her head. "I have to go now," she repeated, unnerved by the woman's scrutiny. She walked away.

She managed to get back before the moon was high. She slipped into a shadowed corner of the house and went to sleep.


	2. Early Childhood

Early Childhood

-

Running.

Scrambling on all fours, sides pressing against her tightly, crushing her. Her arms and legs scraped raw. Moving as fast as she could, straining to go quicker.

Then emptiness. She pitched forward, hands reaching out. She hit a flat, vertical surface, began to fall, feeling the smooth surface seem to race upward. Below her. Behind her. What she was running from.

Her fingers scrabbled against it for purchase, pulling herself upward. Her hands bled, she continued unthinking, only aware of the consuming desire to get away. Her grip was slippery and poor, the tips of her fingers worn away.

Her eyes opened. The child's breathing was even, nearly silent, her heartbeat slow.

There was a short rush of thoughts, a backlog of information she hadn't had time for during the frantic dream. The wall had been cold, like stone, but her hands had burned. She had felt as if there was something tight around her chest, preventing her from breathing. She had seen nothing.

A second passed. Then the child stood.

-

In the morning, she headed uncomplainingly to the school, as she always did. She was grabbed on the way to the classroom. The teacher seized her roughly by the arm and pulled her, dragging her into an empty room she'd never been to.

The teacher was angry. She wanted to run but he was holding her arm tightly enough to bruise. She didn't think she'd be able to get away. Images and sounds filled her head, a replay of past events: this had happened, this had happened, but she couldn't find what had caused this. She didn't know what would make him do this.

Inside the classroom, he turned to her. "Fighting." His voice was strained. He was angry but also…something. "You're in trouble."

She was looking away from his face automatically. Her head was tilted down slightly to hide her eyes. Normally that worked. But this time someone was holding onto her, someone was paying too much attention to her. "Look at me when I'm talking!" he shouted, releasing her arm and grabbing her under her chin with his hand. He pushed her head up.

The ceiling lights were bright, the glare almost blinding for an instant. He stared at her and his face changed as he dug his fingers into her neck.

Pain makes humans cry out. They try to call for help. Another child would have wasted time like that. Another child would have died then.

She acted quickly, twisting to loosen his grip, make his fingers slide instead of puncturing her skin. She tore at his wrist and arm, ripping tendons. His hand was useless, the fingers no longer able to hold, and she pulled back.

He followed. Blood flowed rapidly, but he didn't seem to notice.

She didn't wait the way another child would have, backing away until she met a wall and he grabbed her again. He had no authority to her, nothing that made her hesitate. He had seen her and she understood that he wouldn't stop even if she could get away.

She started to take a step back, her weight shifting, but rocked instead and jumped at him, tackling him. His hands started to claw at her again, the left one running over her side uselessly, the right tearing at her shoulder. Hunching down to make it harder for him to grab, she bit into his neck.

After a little while he stopped moving completely and she stood, feeling stickiness drip down her chin. Her face, arms and chest were splattered in blood. Her feet were luckily dry. Just as when she'd spilled the pear juice, she understood she needed to clean it off before anyone found her.

She listened as humans passed and talked and went to their various rooms. She waited until there was less noise. The door wasn't fully shut, so she didn't have to touch the knob. The hallways were empty. And the door to the bathrooms could be pushed open with her shoulder.

The light inside was dim and comforting, although the sounds from them were not, an unpleasant, irregular hum. The smells made her pause, tense, but she could hear there was no one else.

The sinks were high, made for adults rather than children. She pulled herself up so she could sit on it, leaving bloody handprints on the white porcelain, and turned on the water.

She washed her hands, the water running red for a minute as she examined herself in the mirror, seeing what she needed to do. Her face was red, as was some of her hair. Her clothing was bloody and torn in places, the left shoulder ripped open entirely. She could see scratches on her skin. She was covered in his blood.

She washed it off.

When she was finished, she checked her reflection again. Her eyes were dilated, the pupil filling up most of her eye. She waited, watching in the mirror as it narrowed down to the point where it was about as wide as a human iris, her attempt at normal. It must have been the opposite when the teacher had seen her. Then her eyes had narrowed because of the light, too far, she guessed.

Her skin was white again, with no trace of blood. She'd gotten almost all of it out of her clothing, and the mottled brownish coloring hid any faint stain. The rips wouldn't be noticed. She could still smell the blood faintly on her, though. She didn't like that - it wasn't good to smell of blood. Her hair was wet but clean, the black color glossy from the water.

She washed away the marks on the sink and hopped down. She was unpleasantly wet and cold. She dried herself partway with paper towels, leaving her clothing uncomfortably damp but not dripping. Unless someone touched her, they wouldn't notice.

She continued toward the room, where the students were waiting, talking louder than usual in the absence of teacher. A little later there was loud noise, and an adult came to herd the children inside to another large room with other children, and the adults looked distracted, like they were looking for something past her over her head, and as if they couldn't see her, which she liked. Nothing much happened until after lunch.

The child was walking at the end of the line, trailing well behind because she didn't like to be near them. When she entered the courtyard, the boy from the day before was in her way. The other children had gone off to play, unaware of the confrontation.

"You're lucky Teacher's not here today," he started. "Gonna be in trouble. Gonna-"

"You," she said, the necessary understanding clicking into place. "It was because of you he saw me."

The boy hadn't thought of this. Immediately he assumed the teacher had already spoken with her. He didn't notice her odd choice of words. He did not think to wonder when the teacher would have done this, or why the teacher wasn't there now. "Gotntrouble, didnya?" he said, almost singing the words, mashing them together.

She wrapped her hands around his throat, watching the way his eyes widened until they were bulging. The little boy's entire body began to shake. His big, doughy hands fumbled as they clumsily tried to loosen her grip and failed. "I-i-i-i" he stammered. "I-I'll tell a-again." His eyes rolled frantically from side to side, as if he was aware this was the wrong thing to say, as if he was aware that she was not going to let go.

She squeezed tighter, feeling the skin stretch taut under her grip until it was about to break, like the skin of a soft apple. "I can make sure you won't tell," she promised, watching as his red face gained a blue tint.

He finally tried to scream for help, but it was too late for that. He only managed a croak. Gasping and twitching, he switched promises. "I won't tell," he said, moving his mouth, a tiny bit of air forced through his lips. She could feel the flesh humming under her fingers. She didn't loosen her grip. She knew he wouldn't tell. "Daddy will know it was you."

She considered for a moment, then released her grip. He had already fallen to his knees, making him more-or-less at eye level. He scrambled away on all fours when she let go, then sat up, rubbing his neck. It was red where she had held, with bright crimson bits where her nails had dug in. He didn't say anything, just stared at her with eyes reflecting something she couldn't recognize.

-

There was another teacher the next day, and nothing was mentioned. He did not do anything much different than the old teacher, except for the way he acted like all the adults did now, as if there was something there that was more important than them. The child acted the same, and before long the same pattern reasserted itself.

-

Noise.

Specifically, the malicious laughter of children a few years older than her, the angry shout of an adult, the pounding of feet. She paused at the corner, peering around the edge. She heard the sound of the rubber lining on a door parting, saw half of the glass door fly into her line of sight, three children scrambling onto the street, each carrying an open box, probably once a part of a display. One stumbled and some of what was inside spilled, the round balls rolling lazily in all directions on the broken concrete of the sidewalk. An older man appeared a second later, swearing uninventively as he chased them.

When her ears and eyes both told her they were gone, she ventured out, walking until she was in front of the store.

The child did not steal. She did not understand enough of the world, what the rules were and when they could be broken. She did not go into stores, disliked even going by glass windows. She only did so now because she was sure there was no one inside to see her.

She turned what she had seen around in her mind. There _were things_ inside. The others _had taken things_ and when they did _someone chased them_. So she could take things if she could run faster. But if someone chased her it wouldn't stop looking for her and it might get more. She couldn't get away from more and she couldn't stop more. So she shouldn't take things.

She bent down, grabbing the red and white balls, one in each hand. They were so big she could barely hold them.

Things left by themselves didn't belong to anyone. She knew that. She knew adults couldn't count, because she had seen a woman spill a box of orange fruit, and then only pick up those that were out in the open, even when the others were only a handspan away. So the adult wouldn't remember how many had fallen out, and so it was okay to take these as long as she left before the adult came back.

She did.

She didn't know what they were. She had seen others carrying them, children much older than her. She'd taken them because they were there and strange, and because the others had taken them.

One of the balls moved and she recoiled, dropping both. The first pokeball had split open, exposing the inside. It was mostly empty.

The children had taken this? Had risked for this? The child was curious.

She pressed the top down, shutting it with a click, picked both up, and headed on.

The child went to the remains of a building. What it had been she couldn't tell. Now it was a place of cracks and openings, the fallen concrete slabs arranged precariously, with gaps in places. From the outside it looked like a mostly solid pile. She wiggled through one of the larger holes and came into the center, where two of the largest pieces had fallen together, creating a sizable hollow underneath. She sat under them, in their shadow.

It was a dull place, the brownish color of the ground and the grey of the walls seeming to leech into each other. The child felt somewhat unfitting there, as if she stood out, lacked the dullness, failed to blend together into another shade of the place. Once she had scooped up a handful of dirt and tried to rub it into her arm, but her skin underneath had stayed distinct. But the unfitting feeling was canceled by the counter-feeling of not being watched. It was okay that you could be seen if there wasn't anyone to see you.

No one came there, not even the rattata. The child didn't know why, nor did she find it noteworthy. Almost nothing in the world made sense to her. It was, and she only remembered.

She ferreted away the two balls in one of the places the concrete had split, and left again.

She headed toward the house.

-

There was blood in the air, distinct from the sharp smell of alcohol and vinegar, the musty smell of rotting wood. It was from a while ago, several hours.

The smell of blood made her feel strange sometimes, when she didn't know what it was or why it was or if it was dead or not. Blood inside the house was okay. It was probably a rattata, almost certainly dead, and even if it wasn't, bloody-not-dead things were okay too, as long as they were in the house. She wasn't sure why that was.

The man who might have been her father killed rattata mainly. She found feathers sometimes too, things he'd missed. She didn't know if he just hated those ones or if he hated all of them, whatever them might have ended up being. She did know he hated them. She didn't really wonder much about it. It was another piece of the world, distinct and disconnected and senseless, and because it didn't much affect her, she focused less on it. She didn't know why he killed them, but he killed them when he saw them and he had seen her and he hadn't killed her, so if he decided to kill her, she was pretty sure it wouldn't have to do with why he killed the rattata.

She didn't even understand why he would pick up the bodies, wash the floors afterward. Spilled bottles, spilled things, those he didn't notice. But the bodies she rarely saw. She didn't know why.

Inside was choking dustiness and safe dimness. She paused to listen automatically, pinpointing the man, then headed toward the cabinets. She was hungry.

-

She figured out what the red-white balls were pretty easily. She simply followed people with them, kids who were a little safer than adults if they saw her accidentally, until she saw. She stayed in shadows mainly, as she always did, and there she was safe.

The balls held moving-not-human-things. She knew they were called pokemon, that the rattata and the spearow were kinds of pokemon, but she only knew a few types and they were all dissimilar and she saw new ones often that she couldn't recognize. So as she thought of it, the balls held things that moved, and were not humans.

She didn't think much of this knowledge. She didn't have any reason to find a rattata and keep it in one place. What she found more important was that what looked like one could actually be two or three or more, but that 'more' would never have more than just the one human.

The rattata were always there, and she didn't care about them. They were unimportant, with a very faint sense of danger offset by their inability to act. They wouldn't do anything. They stayed in shadows, but not like her.

-

She didn't know.

She'd turned down the alley on a whim. Not because she'd seen anything interesting, not because there was anything about it that was special.

She hadn't done it out of a dislike for where she was going, an attempt to delay. She didn't do that. If she wanted to put something off, she would be equally able to stand still waiting. At this time, the idea of tricking oneself, of knowing but not knowing, of pretending and believing it, it was not something she was even aware of.

She had just turned down the alley because she had, just as she walked because she did and watched because she did and repeated because she did.

And there was one of the piles of discarded…everything, cloth and plastic and rubber and bone and glass, the same sort of thing that could be found littering any alley. She was never interested in them.

But this pile moved. Twitched and quivered as she approached. Or, one corner of it moved, a ball of rags. She reached down and pulled it open.

Something inside snarled at her. She took two steps back, looking at it curiously. She had never heard that noise before.

She had also never seen anything like them before.

It took a moment, in fact, to determine that there were two. When she first saw them they were a single image, a dark jumble with bits of white dashed on: eyes, teeth, exposed bone, claws. Then she separated them into two, which looked different but not too different, made in the same mold as some of the other things she had seen walking behind children. Four limbs, a head, two eyes in the usual place.

One reacted. It looked close to the rats, about the same size. She could see white bulges on its back, bone, and she could see its ribs through its skin.

Hungry. She could feel it judging her, trying to decide if it could kill her.

The child did not know how strange it was to find them. They could have come from a number of sources, all unlikely. A trainer nearby could have released them, having bought eggs and decided after hatching it wasn't worth it to raise them until they could fight. Perhaps there was a group of them nearby. Or perhaps they were from someone there, involved in breeding or smuggling or such. The place was mostly dead, but there were still sparks of life that burned all the brighter for it.

Those thoughts would come far later.

At the time, her thinking was simple. Something different, something strange. She picked out something from the lunch she'd been given, a packaged roll of greasy meat. One of the things about school she didn't understand: now the man gave her things. The plastic wrapper was tough and stretched instead of ripping. Without taking her eyes from the growling thing, she bit into the package.

She tossed a piece. The growling one stopped growling. Its nose twitched slightly as it smelled the food, but didn't take it. Instead it pushed the other one, whining. The second one's eyes opened.

Sick. So she was only dealing with one.

She moved her hand as if to throw them the other half, lunged, and grabbed the first one.

"Or!" it howled, writhing under her grip. It snapped at her but the angle was wrong. She held onto it from the back.

It was new, interesting. The birds she saw were usually far away, and those who let her creep up on them to see had a dull look to them, unthinking. The rats were not like that, dull in their own way, what she would have called apathetic if she knew the word.

These were different. Dark, full of contrast, not dull. She turned the thing so she could look at it in the face. It barred its teeth at her and growled.

"Who are you?" she asked. Then: "Whose are you?"

The thing gave no response. It continued growling. After a minute under her unchanging stare, the noise slowly died. She bent to pick up the second piece of meat, dropped when she'd grabbed the thing, and offered it.

The thing bit, tossing its head back as it chewed, its movements only somewhat hampered by her grasp. It swallowed, then growled softly.

The other thing was nibbling at the food she'd thrown. She dropped the pokemon in her hand and pulled out more of what she was given.

-

They followed her.

This baffled the child. The one who walked on four legs was ready to kill her, had been…something. And now that was all gone. She had fed them, but that wasn't it. They weren't expecting more.

She had acted because they were there. The child was very good at seeing different options, dozens blossoming in her mind and spinning off when presented with any decision. But she was not good at planning. She didn't think ahead.

She was not sure what to do with them. She would have to go back to the house at some point. That was where she got food. The two things listened to her, but she could not tell them anything. If they followed her, the man would kill them.

Now she wanted to keep a pokemon in one place. Days and days back, an amount she could count if she had the inclination but otherwise ignored, far back she had gotten the pokeballs and left them where there wasn't anything else.

She headed there. The two followed her, through shadow as well as light. They saw her. And uncomplaining they went through the cracks in the rubble, into the center, and without struggle turned the color of fresh blood and vanished.

The child dropped them into one pocket and left.

-

His eyes half-focused on her. "Whataryoudoinup?" he mumbled. She stared at him silently. "Go…gotasleep. 'Slate." He took another sip. She started to retreat backward. "Noh. Gotabed, shuldnbeup."

The child walked in the required direction. She did what she was told, mainly for lack of any other desire. She was there because she was. Now she would be something else. There wasn't much difference.

The room she came to was bare. She didn't spend much time there, just sometimes when it was cold. Where she slept was mainly based on where she felt was unseen, and if a place fulfilled that, she didn't care about much else.

There was a blanket on the bed, a heavy one. She crawled underneath it. As it pressed down, she felt a flash of completing feelings: safe-trapped protecting-smothering exposed-hidden, and then they were gone again.


	3. Early Childhood

Early Childhood

-

The child lay on her stomach, her chin resting on her hands. The two pokemon watched her.

They wouldn't leave but moved away when she moved toward them, staying a foot or so distant. They were watching her, but not like the children and very much not like the adults. A little like the spearow had.

She held still. One crept forward hesitantly, prepared to run back at any moment. She held still. It reached out a paw, tapping the top of her head. The feeling was strange, inverted – she could remember this, but last time she had been smaller, not bigger, and the touch was heavy, not light. She sat up.

The pokemon skittered back a few steps, claws tapping against the concrete, then warily approached.

"Hello," the child said.

It stared up at her. "Selul," it told her. Not like the spearow. It had tried to say what she was saying.

"Hello," the child repeated.

"Selul," it said again. Then, "Ni sul si sni nil." It hopped onto her lap. She didn't move. "Sel li sel," it added seriously. It climbed up her arm, onto her shoulder, and then perched atop her head. "Sul lini." She moved and it jumped down again.

The other one had been holding back, but now it came forward. It rested its front paws on her leg, then jumped up. "Houn!" it barked.

"Hello."

"Horou"

Not like the spearow. The spearow had talked, it had known more than her. Half-like the spearow. Not like the other birds at all, who didn't even make noise. Not like the rattata, who hid and wouldn't do anything.

The puppy sneezed, releasing a puff of smoke. The child looked at it with interest. She hadn't seen that before. "Do that," she said, her voice attracting its attention. It looked at her. She tried to move her throat like it had and made the same sound. When it didn't do anything, she repeated the action.

It made a sound like a cough and produced another black wisp.

"Do that," she said. She mimicked it. It made another bit of smoke. "Do that." It did.

The bird had known and she had listened. These didn't know but they listened to her. She'd learned, so the child thought they could.

Time passed. She touched the button of one ball, then the other, and the two things turned red and disappeared. She put them into one pocket and left.

-

People were chasing her.

She didn't know why. Something to do with territory, she thought, hearing what they were saying. That wasn't good. She went this way after school ended. She could detour but not if she didn't know what the area she had to avoid was.

They hadn't really seen her. That was good. The child scrambled around the corner and ducked into the second alley on the left. Never try to hide in the first alley, that was where they looked always.

She held still, pressed up against the side of the wall. There were angry, confused voices near her, out in the street. Grumbling but not dangerous now. They weren't focused. Without their quarry, they lost interest, dogs losing scent of a fox. They talked to each other, started to leave.

Something wrapped around her ankle and yanked.

She twisted as she fell to see what it was. A plant. She didn't like the plants, she had a lot of trouble understanding them. It had a vine wrapped around her leg and was pulling her toward it.

She didn't know what its name was and had never cared. There were a few of them in the corners of the city. The child had seen ones catch rattata before. She knew they were dangerous.

It had a large head and a thin, spindly stalk that was rooted in the back of the alley, where the cement had broken to expose dirt. The whole thing was a brownish-white color, even the two parts on its side that looked like leaves. That was the color they always were.

She tried to pull back, but it wouldn't let go. She grabbed the vine in her hands and bit, pulling at it until the vine snapped. She scrambled away, dodging a second vine.

Behind her she heard a hissing sound, and she saw a yellow powder appearing out of the plant's head, like the white breath people had when it was cold. She didn't know what it was. She kept going, and a light wind blew it over her. She coughed, her lungs seizing up, and she stumbled and fell, scraping her hand. She felt a vine touch her leg again and she pushed herself up and ran.

She hid. Her body went numb and she had trouble moving. Sometimes she couldn't breathe. She waited. There was nothing else she could do but wait.

Time passed. The feeling went away. She stood and left.

-

The child heard a wet crushing sound. She peeked around the corner and saw as the man stepped on the corpse again.

Another rattata. The child wondered why they kept coming.

The man saw her, stopped, stepped in front of it so his leg blocked her view. One shoe was bloody. She didn't try to look around to see it. He didn't like her seeing them.

She held her scraped hand behind her.

He looked disconcertingly alert. "What."

"I'm hungry," she said. She didn't know what else to say. She stepped into the hallway and then through the doorway on the other side. The food was kept in cabinets. The shortest way there was through the hallway, but with him there, she went around through the rooms instead.

The man had never hurt her. He was strong enough to kill her. She didn't like getting too close to him.

-

It had been a while since the new teacher. Things were a little back to normal. All the teachers were a little subdued, the new teacher maybe the most of all. The child liked that. The teacher was distracted too, which meant some of the other children acted worse, which meant the teacher was even more distracted dealing with them, and didn't pay any attention at all to her.

The child didn't want to keep going to school, but she didn't want anyone to notice her. If she stopped the woman might come back.

-

There were two children outside of the school at the end of one day, several years older than her. They were watching the younger children intently, and they saw her and kept looking at her.

When she tried walking away they had followed her.

Speed up and they would run. Keep walking and they'd catch up. Duck into an alley and wait until they gave up and they'd notice, remember her. She knew, she'd tried that before, it didn't work when people had looked at her closely already.

They hadn't seen her yet, not really, she was sure of that, she could hear it in their footsteps. She wasn't even sure if kids could see her really. It had never happened before.

"Hey."

Not respond – anger, running to grab her. Turn, stop – they'd catch her then. She was going east, was on the sunlit side of the street, no shadows on the wall. She paused, turned, and they cornered her against the wall.

But they still hadn't really seen her. They didn't attack her.

"Hey," the boy said again. "You. You got an older brother? Or are you oldest? You the first?"

"I'm the only," the child said.

The other one turned to the boy. "I told you this wasn't the right one," she said.

"Yeah, damn. Hey kid, you got anything?"

"It's a kid, wha'dya think?"

"We already wasted our time on her. Might as well get something out of it. Sucks to go back empty handed. Plenty of guys use kids to ferry stuff." He grabbed her. "Got any money, kiddo?"

She held still, considering. She didn't know how to deal with two. She didn't like it when they were together, acting the same. "No," she said. "I don't have money." She kept her eyes down.

The boy yanked her arm, made her stumble a step forward. He grabbed at the pocket on her right leg, found it empty. She tried to pull away but he wouldn't let go. He tried to reach into her other pocket. She struggled and it tore. One of the pokeballs fell out.

"Hey," the boy said, letting go of her, "you do have something." He picked up the pokeball. She grabbed it.

The girl didn't look impressed. "It's probably just a rattata or something."

The boy's face looked surprised, then annoyed. He was trying to pull away, but she wasn't letting go of the pokeball. She dug her heels in as he pulled, bracing against a split in the sidewalk.

The girl saw this and laughed. "Is the widdle kid too strong for you?"

Anger. He pulled harder. She dug her nails into his hand and he yelled, letting go. She fell backwards, her head cracking against the wall.

"Jesus," the boy swore, shaking his hands to try to get rid of the sting. "You little brat!"

The girl looked angry now too. She kicked the child's hands, knocking the pokeball out of her grasp. It hit the ground and opened.

"Weird looking," the boy said.

"I've never seen that. Probably worth money."

The boy's head tipped sharply once, jerked back up – sign of agreement. The child thought it was a bad move. It unfocused his eyes. She started to get up.

The girl stomped on her hand, trapping in place. The boy tried to grab the pokemon. It cut him; the child saw a red line appear on his palm. He cursed. "It sliced open my hand!" he yelled, sounding more indignant than anything.

"Stop whining and grab it."

The child didn't try to pull her hand free. The pressure hurt and she knew better than to try to pull. Instead she shoved, hitting the girl's legs with her side, and the girl stumbled backward.

The girl kicked her. "Hurry up," she told the boy.

"I'm trying!" he said, sounding frustrated. He grabbed the pokemon. It hissed and swiped a paw through the air.

One of the boy's hands hit the ground. Blood spurted from his arm like water from a hose. He screamed, the sound painful.

The child managed to stand. The girl wasn't watching her now. The child remembered hitting her head, how she had felt like she couldn't move. She shoved the girl again hard, knocking her down, and then slammed her head into the wall.

Then she grabbed the pokemon and ran.

-

When she was far enough away that the boy's yells didn't hurt her ears, she stopped. She set the pokemon down and stared at it. It stared back.

The child grabbed one of the pokemon's paws and looked at it. She saw a fragment of white and then felt a prick. She pulled her hand back and stared at the cut on her finger. A drop of blood slowly welled up. Confused, the child licked it off, then watched as another appeared. Instinctively she bit the cut to make it stop bleeding.

The child felt curious. That hadn't happened before, not to her. She pressed her wrist against a sharp break in a building and scraped it slightly, but it was no different than before.

What had the boy said? She looked at the pokemon. "Slice," she said.

"Sni?"

-

The child felt trapped. She didn't want to stay at school. Being there was causing too many problems.

But if she vanished, and then someone said something, they'd know. It only worked if she could be just like the others, if no one remembered her.

The child had seen other children not be there. Another child would say something to the teacher, and he would look or call. The child didn't want this.

She watched. Certain children remembered certain others.

She watched. Three children looked at her and their eyes stopped and saw her. Three would notice if she was gone.

-

The larger boy she didn't know what to do with. She didn't want him to die at school. If he died then his father would remember her maybe, and that would be worse. The smaller boy and the girl she thought wouldn't have this problem, so she decided to get rid of them first.

Those two weren't that big. They were smaller than many of the others, although still bigger than her.

The kindergarten class went to the playground yard by themselves, not with all the other classes like older grades, so there weren't so many people out at once, and the two weren't usually surrounded by a number of others. It was possible to grab someone without being noticed for minutes, at the most.

On either side of the school were patches of dense, brambly weeds, in the space between the brick school wall and the outside chain-link fence.

They were tall and thick enough to hide the body of an adult.

-

"Hi," she told the boy. "Come here."

"Why?" he asked, even as he did so.

It was okay to talk to him, draw his attention. She tugged him over to the edge of the brambles, glanced around quickly, and yanked him sharply into the weeds. His first cry was weakened by her hands around his throat, and after that he could make no noise beyond a thin hiss. When he stopped moving and started to grow cooler, she let go. She could see marks on the skin of his neck. She held her hands over them. They looked like her fingers.

She broke one of the thorny vines, wrapped it around his throat, and twisted it around until the skin was a bloody mess.

She peered out then slithered out of the plants. She approached the girl.

-

The bell rang. The child lined up dutifully with the others and headed inside, following the teacher who came out only to collect them.

Time passed. Soon, outside, there was a noise from a child, then the horrified yell of a teacher. The older grades had a teacher during recess, and some of the children there, bored, had poked around the weeds.

There was more yelling, and the teacher in the room went to the door and stood half-in-half-out, like he wanted to leave but wasn't sure. When he glanced back into the room, the child saw his face looked a little…something, like he was trying to hide it. And then another teacher came and they were all herded into a big room with older children and several adults, who all stared over their heads rather than at the children.

Some of the adults talked softly and were quiet when children came near, which the child didn't understand, because she could still hear them, so why not talk the way they usually did? They were talking about a pokemon, and calling parents, and money.

But none of them were paying attention to her, and the room had dim lights, so the child didn't mind anything they were doing.

The adults finally seemed to come to a conclusion. The child didn't hear all of it because the adults came and went and she could only hear what they were saying when they were in the same room, but it had to do with most parents being unreachable anyway and someone wanting to know why they didn't say something earlier. The child didn't understand.

Time passed. The other children grew noisy and bored and destructive. At the usual time, they left.

-

The next day the adults were acting a little like they had when the child killed the teacher, which the child liked because they paid even less attention to her than usual. Even better, this time some of the children were acting funny and distracted to, like the adults were.

-

The child started following the last boy, watching and waiting.

One day she found how to do it.

Two children were watching pokemon fight, and others were watching from further away. The child saw the boy's look as he watched them, greedy and angry.

He wanted pokeballs and the things inside.

And she had those.

-

The children were heading home again. The final boy was just out of sight of the building, had just stepped away from the group. The child ran to catch up with him. She held out a pokeball.

He saw that first, then looked up to see her.

"Want?" she asked.

He did. She saw his eyes stare at it for too long before he said, "Nothing's in there. You don't have anything."

"Do," she said.

"Liar."

"Do." She backed up easily as he grabbed for it.

"Show me if you're notta liar."

"Not here," the child said. "Come with me? I'll show you."

If he'd been a few years older he'd have known better. He would have been suspicious. But at his age children made friends and enemies quickly and insubstantially. She was small, she looked harmless, she was offering him something. He hadn't understood what she'd tried to do.

He made his mistake. He followed her.

She stopped by an alley, opened the pokeball. He stared at it for a few seconds before she grabbed him, covering his mouth with one hand and grabbing between his shoulder and neck with the other.

He thrashed around, trying to shake her off. His arms flailed, trying to hit her, but she was behind him. She bore the glancing blows silently and dug her hand into his neck, feeling the blood run down her arm.

When he stopped moving, she pulled her hand out. The blood had soaked one side of her shirt. She pushed the body into the alley, saw the brown-white thing stir. She touched the button on the pokeball and the puppy vanished inside. Then she left before the plant could decide it wanted to eat her too.

-

There was a yellow glitter on the floor. The child crawled toward it and picked it up. It was flat and round, like a coin, but somewhat stretched, a little like an egg, and one side had a row of groves over it. There was a wetness on the other side, smearing her fingers red. She turned it over, watching how it glinted in the dim light.

The man snatched it out of her hands. She scrambled back automatically, watching as he swore and stomped on it, breaking it into pieces and grinding the fragments down against the floor.

The child blinked.

There were white shards on the floor. She crawled toward them and picked them up. They were curved and reddish on the underside and they glinted in the light.

She sat there, turning the white shards over and over in her hands endlessly until her eyes opened.


	4. Late Childhood

(Note: although I don't mind questions in reviews, if you actually want an answer, it'd be best to email me or complain in my livejournal.)

Late Childhood

-

She didn't have to go there.

The child was more than twice the age when she'd first found the pokemon. She now looked about eight or nine years old, although she could pass herself as older if she tried, changing her posture, her bearing, enough to offset the physical.

She understood more as well, was starting to have enough knowledge to fit all of the world into a single concept. She had an idea of how things worked. Understood people, shops, trainers. And although it did not occur to her in relation to herself, she knew the legal age of a trainer. She did not think of leaving because she thought of it in terms of what people would think her age was, rather than the age she was, and because the situation here was not intolerable.

Here was a better place than it had been. She had food. She was bigger, big enough not to have to worry so much about others. She looked old enough to buy things, barely, and she understood money. She had no reason to leave.

She was still not safe, she knew, and so she was still wary. There were more of them than there were of her. Too many adults.

One such adult was following her. He had seen her while the pokemon were fighting. She had noticed him but couldn't hide, not with the other child watching withnarrow blue eyes.

When the fight was over, she had started to leave. The air tasted heavy and electric, a certain sign of rain. She wanted to find somewhere to wait it out.

The man followed.

When they tried to hurt her, they didn't wait. This alone made her wait as well. There had been no change in expression, no lunge and clawing fingers. She didn't know what he wanted, so she thought that he might not have really seen her. If that was true he wouldn't keep following her once she lost him. It was easier to leave and hide, so she tried to do that.

The child headed into an alley and flattened up against the back wall, the shadows falling over her like a thick curtain. The man followed, walking in even thought he could see it was empty.

That was something they did when they would hurt her. When they would hurt her they wouldn't stop.

He kept going for a moment but stopped just before the wall, before he would have touched her. She was tense, prepared for attack. He couldn't see her, she knew that, could see it herself in his eyes, but he stayed, staring into the darkness.

She waited, holding perfectly still, her breath silent, but he didn't leave. Wouldn't. He was going to stay. She stared, working it out. He had seen her turn in, was certain she couldn't have gotten out, believed in the walls more than he believed in his eyes.

Trapped. Did she wait? It was going to rain. Dart by him – no, she could feel him grab her as she tried, around her side, tangling her arms so she couldn't move properly.

He wouldn't leave. People who wouldn't stop when they couldn't see her would hurt her.

She reached out, and she could see his eyes focusing, could see in his eyes a white arm reaching from blackness, and she sunk her fingers into his throat.

Rain was coming. Hard rain. She licked at her hand. No time to wash it off. It didn't taste much different than what she ate normally, laced with contamination.

She didn't really like to get wet. She was still thin, wiry, and when she was wet it was hard to stay warm.

She didn't have to go there, but it was close, and she had spent too much time trying to avoid the adult.

So she headed to the house. Home was a word she found arbitrary. All places she went to were equal to her in feeling. The other places were other places. But she could use the word, understand its definition, even if she found the criteria meaningless.

So she went home. The other places, which did not have a special word to describe them, either did not keep out the water or were else too far away to get to before the storm.

The man who might have thought himself her father wasn't there. She knew that before she opened the door. She heard the normal murmuring of noise, the perpetual settling of the place. She opened the thin door, tasting dust and rotten powdering wood and alcohol and sourness in the air, chokingly thick as always. She couldn't remember the first time she'd smelled it.

She headed toward the cabinet room, the name of which she knew but didn't think of, releasing the pokemon by habit. She kept them out often. Safer that way. She intended to feed them part of what she found.

She climbed onto the counter, by the sink, kneeling on the hard surface. She was still too small to reach the upper cabinets from the ground. She started to look through them but didn't find much.

Rain drummed on the rooftop. A flash lit up the room brightly, and she clapped her hands over her ears as quickly as she could, the rumble that came after painful even with her attempt to muffle it. Another flash she saw from behind closed eyes. Another thunderclap. Another. Another.

The sound of a door slamming, heard like an echo after the thunder. The child's eyes opened and she started to get down as another flash of lightning, very close, burned into her sight, half-blinding, so that she lost her balance as she landed and fell. And then there was the man.

His expression changed when he saw them, broke into many things.

He didn't look at her like that. But this time he was looking at them. And she knew he hated things like them, could see the hatred and the anger and something else too, several somethings maybe.

He'd already seen the two pokemon. There was no point in trying to recall them, running off. He'd know she had them. He remembered her from one time to another, although she didn't know why.

She scrambled upright as he threw a chair at the sneasel, knocking her down. The houndour snarled, jumped forward, glowing and growing in size and the man backed away, a strange expression on his face, the color of his skin odd. The child didn't hesitate. She grabbed the sneasel. The hound following at her heels, she ran into the dark rain. Behind her the man yelled, but she ignored the words and kept going.

She hid elsewhere. The sky cleared, and she stared upward, into obsidian flecked with shards of ice. She waited, pressed up against her houndoom for warmth. Her clothing dried. Her sneasel woke, ate, the minor bruises fading swiftly.

The next day, she returned. Her hand reached out toward the door, but she could smell what was inside. And she turned and walked out of the city without looking back.


	5. Trainer

_…And the maker took two handfuls of dust, and wet the dust with its blood, and with this the maker made all creatures. When the maker finished it shook the dry dust off the back of its hands and some of this dust fell down to the new-made earth. There the dust lay, and it formed itself into a shape, and the shape sat up and stood, and it said, "Look at what I have done. I have made myself."_

-

Trainer

-

The child did not head toward the city she had taken the spearow. She had not seen anything there she had liked. Another place might be better or worse, but she was willing to try something different.

She walked along one of the paths leading out of the city, a simple, wide dirt road always surrounded by grass or trees. She had taken the southern one before, and now she went east. She saw many of the same kinds of things the bird had named for her, plants and trees of all sorts, and some things she had never seen. This time, without the bird's noise, there was little to announce her presence, and she saw pokemon sometimes, some she had never seen outside of pictures, and others entirely new.

The first things she saw were thick worms, some green and others orange. These did not seem to notice her at all, and continued along with their crawling up and down trees. They were quiet and she did not hear their names, nor did she care enough to wait. She passed round indigo balls with short legs and leaves during the night, and these noticed her a little but did nothing, and they made noise often, so she knew they would be called oddish. She saw one bird, bigger than the dull-eyed ones in the city, and she heard its voice, so she knew what people would call it, pidgeotto. There was a legless purple thing like the worms but bigger and faster, and though it was silent she recognized it from a picture she'd seen as ekans. By some of the trees were strange things like stones, and they had eyes that would move and the same kind of colors as the worms, and those she avoided. There was also a yellow thing made of three balls, with black stripes on the bottom and pointy round white arms and clear wings. It was as big as she was. She heard that one's name as well, beedrill.

She also saw things like the plants from the city. But they were different, with bright yellow heads and pinkish-red mouths, glossy green leaves and a deep brown middle. They had little things like legs, weak and feeble looking but they did walk. She was careful to avoid those.

When the child grew tired, she slept for short bits, finding hidden places just like she had in the city. In hollows under rocks, caves made from tree roots, bushes that had grown up and fallen over in an arch. She slept for very short periods, and more often than she had before.

When she got water to drink, she sometimes saw things in the streams, sometimes round pink and white things with a spike like the orange worms and a puffy tail and other times round blue things with flat tails and one white side. She watched them closely, because she did not know what they were or might do, but they never came near the surface.

-

The place the child came to was somewhat less active than the spearow's asked-for city had been. There were fewer people than there had been there, and more people than there had been at the city she had left. Otherwise it was very much the same, with the air tasting different from the air outside it, and with buildings and flat hard ground that the child was familiar with, and although there were not bright lights everywhere the child could see places that looked the same as the places that glowed in the other city during the night.

No one watched her, so she continued in, along the street.

She hadn't eaten. She could smell food in the air, headed towards one of the places, and bought a meal, something cheap, bread and meat, mostly bread. There the person stared at her too long, asked her if she were lost, where her parents were.

She ate quickly and left, before anything could happen. Back outside she watched other children, tried to see if there was something she could do to avoid the attention the next time.

She realized the children in this city were bigger than the one she had left, not by a very lot, but that she was smaller in comparison. She shadowed children for a bit, watching to see which people noticed and which they ignored, which children could go to stores without questions being asked. She found little useful, mainly that the unbothered children were bigger than she was, and acted boldly and confidently, which would not help her avoid notice.

The child headed through the city, passing a pink-roofed building like the one she'd brought the spearow to. A girl stepping out of the doors just then, perhaps the same age as she was, looked at the child and her eyes paused disconcertingly, focusing on the child's left hand, where she was holding the two pokeballs. The child kept her fingers curled tightly inward. The girl walked toward the child, who watched her warily.

"You're a trainer, right? I challenge you to a battle."

A trainer. That was what they wanted her to be now.

"Yes," the trainer said.

-

So now she was a trainer.

The trainer found the word strange, jarring, mixed meanings twisting around imprecisely. _A__ trainer_ was the word for the image of a person carrying pokemon. But she was not _someone who trained_, or _who was in charge of someone else training_, so the trainer did not understand why the word was used. She felt like there was something she was missing, some piece she needed to fit it all together, so that she kept chasing it around in her mind unsatisfiedly.

But she did understand what the word meant, even if she found the designation odd.

So now she was a trainer.

-

Being a trainer would be harder than living in the city, she found. She traveled, something very different than before, when she had left the boundaries of the city only once. She had to keep going, find more people, more other trainers, to get enough money. Besides, she had no reason to stay. She did not want to sleep in cities and wished especially to avoid them at night, when the streets were filled with patches of searing light that burned through the darkness and hurt her eyes. Because of this, she spent most of the time traveling between places. She had to move quickly, get from one place to another before the food she had purchased ran out.

Feeding the pokemon and herself was hard. She didn't know any way to get food other than by buying it from people, and it was a challenge to find enough people to fight with for the money that required. Just as in the city before, keeping the pokemon healthy cost money, and this time she didn't have another source of food.

But as long as she kept moving, she was safe. This she understood. People didn't remember her if they met her only in passing once, and even if they did, they couldn't find her if she had left already. Outside the cities people were few and all younger, not dangerous to her. Not that dangerous.

She knew she didn't blend in like before. Being a trainer meant attracting attention for a moment, and she was herself not that unremarkable. People were unsure, she didn't look quite old enough, but never unsure enough to do something, at least before she was gone again. As long as she kept moving, she thought, she was safe. Safe enough.

Whether her life was better or worse she couldn't say. It never occurred to her to think about it.

-

The trainer balanced a large paper bag half as tall as she was in one arm while she grabbed the pokeballs with her other hand and opened them. She was in the third town she'd ever entered, and she had just finished buying food. It made more sense to feed them now than to carry it all elsewhere.

The two lunged at the bag as soon as she set it down, pulling out the food and gulping it down.

There were footsteps behind her, two sets, then a pause. The pokemon both slowed down their eating, no longer acting as if starved. They had seen how fast other pokemon ate, and they matched that. The trainer turned.

A boy and a girl, similar looking and about the same size, each with short brown hair and grayish blue eyes. Their age was somewhere between ten and eleven, maybe as much as a year younger than she was and bigger, not just in height but in stature – thicker, wider, filled out not quite to the point of chubbiness, and they were dressed in ordinary, unremarkable clothing. They stared back at her, at the pokemon.

"Wow, what kind of pokemon are those?" asked the boy. His voice was clear, harmless, direct.

The pokemon had both stopped eating. They watched the two children. The trainer pointed. "Sneasel. Houndoom."

"I've never seen any like that," the boy said, his voice holding the faintest hint of wanting, but it didn't sound dangerous. More curious, not an active, going-to-do-something sound. "Where did you get them?"

Would they go away on their own or did she need to do something? the child wondered. "I found them," she said.

"What are their names?" the girl asked.

Names…?

But the question didn't sound harmful, didn't even sound focused. The trainer pointed again. "Slice. Apocalypse." Because that was what they had been called.

-

She was sitting in the corner of a too-bright plaza, off where the walls of two buildings met and made a light triangular shadow, and she was eating voraciously. She had run out of food the day before. She was eating something she did not know the name of, cheap and made of bread and potatoes and several green plants and meat and something spicy and annoying. She swallowed it in large chunks, watching the thick, jostling crowd, who in turn were watching two people stand in the center who were in turn watching two pokemon fight.

There was a child darting through the crowd, she noted. No one else seemed to see him, everyone looking around well above his head. As she watched, his hand darted out and yanked a brown square from a person's pocket. Then again, and again.

She watched, dividing it up into sections, comparing different people. The people who didn't move or look or do anything tended to be shoved up against others. The less contact, the more likely it was the person might fidget and seem about to look, and then the boy would freeze and pull back.

She kept watching, saw as one pokemon lay on the ground twitching, then both turned red, and then a stack of money changed hands between the two people who had been in the center, and the crowd began to disperse.

She saw the boy's expression, greedy and wanting and dangerous except that it wasn't aimed at her, she saw him start towards the trainer who had been given the money as the crowd spread and dwindled, saw him reach for that trainer standing all by himself not touching anyone –

Then yelling as the winning trainer turned and tried to grab him, and running, past all the people who were suddenly alert, suddenly blocking his way, and he fell and some of the wallets scattered then he ran out of sight.

The trainer continued eating, absorbing what she'd seen. So it was okay to take pocketed things as long as the people were touching other things. She thought about this, wondering why that was. She didn't think it would be worth the risk and unpleasantness to squeeze into a crowd, not just for money, so the knowledge didn't impact her that much, but she did remember it, and considered it as a maybe thing, if she didn't have any better options.

-

"Hey-" The other trainer grabbed her hand, starting to turn it over. "What's-"

She jerked out of his grasp and ran, money unclaimed. When she thought she'd gone far enough she stopped and waited, looking around cautiously. It didn't seem he'd followed her.

The trainer looked down at her hands thoughtfully. She didn't want people to look at them closely, like her eyes. The nails were thicker than the boy's had been, and they widened at the base to cover the tips of her fingers. She knew this was different than the way the others' hands looked, just as her eyes were different than the way the others' eyes looked, so she didn't want them to notice.

-

Things started to look different to the trainer as time passed. The process was gradual, taking place in the first few months, but the trainer noticed. Details that had been indistinct before became clear. She could see the ground was made up of grains now, when before it had seemed a single thing, and the tiny veins on the leaves of plants. Colors sharpened and strengthened. This all happened slowly, but the trainer could remember seeing something before, and she could see the differences between what she remembered and what she saw.

The trainer did not know why this was until many months later, when she stayed inside of a city for five days. Until that point, she only knew it was so.

-

The trainer shook her head. "No, I don't want to fight you."

"You can't just refuse!"

The trainer hopped off the seat, dropping half a foot or so to the ground. The restaurant benches were big enough for adults to sit comfortably on; they were much too large for her. "I refuse," the trainer said, disliking the boy for the humming wrongness and assumed arrogance under his words.

The boy was ten, bigger than her, although he was almost two years younger. "You're just saying that because you know I'll win!"

"No," the trainer said. She walked past him, dodging to the side as he tried to grab one arm. "Go have your fight with someone else." Her two were both injured and tired. If she fought now, they might gain severe wounds, ones that couldn't be healed on their own. Then she would have to spend the money on medicine. She did not think the boy was carrying enough money to make up for this.

"But you're the one who beat Matt!"

She turned.

"Matt's always trying to prove he's better than me, and then he loses to a pipsqueak little girl like you! So if I beat you –"

Saw her. Remembered her. Repeated her.

She didn't want that.

The trainer didn't wait. She left quickly, leaving the city before anything more could happen.

-

The trainer heard a short, loud scream, like someone being killed. She stopped, considered, then headed towards the sound.

People died loud for a lot of different reasons. Usually loud meant the body wouldn't have anything else done to it, any money still there. Or sometimes the body might be cut or torn a lot, and usually the money was left those times too. In the trainer's experience, it was bodies that had been made without any noise that usually didn't have money with them. The trainer didn't know why this was, but she knew it. This had happened often in the city.

Another good thing about screams was that usually whoever else had been there left quick, so they wouldn't be dangerous to her. The trainer thought sometimes it might be different maybe, if the thing that killed the person was a staying-in-one-place thing, like the city plants. Still, those sort of things weren't that dangerous either, not if she was careful.

When she got close, she could hear tearing, gulping sounds, slobbery and wet. She paused, listening. She had never heard that. She felt curious and so she continued, even more carefully than normal.

There was something blue there. It looked a bit like the red and striped big dogs, its form stout and thick, but it was hairless, its body shiny slick. There was something else about it, odd, the neck and head looking closer in form to human ones, and its body was flat with wide shoulders, so that the arms went out to either side. It was tearing at what it killed, a crimson wet thing, making little grunts and noises as it gulped down chunks. The remains of the clothing were still there, mostly red-stained, but on the edges the color was a dirt-smeared white.

The trainer thought the thing didn't look too fast. She could see a square bulge on the leg on the left, which had been broken off just above the hip. She wanted that. And she thought the blue thing wasn't so big it would want to eat her too, and that if it did she could probably run away fast enough.

She slid out from behind the bushes carefully. Its head moved and they stared at each other.

"Rha…." it growled.

The trainer couldn't tell if it meant something. She waited, but the thing didn't make another sound.

She took a step forward. Uneasily, it moved back slightly. She kept going, moving to the side. **I don't want this**, she said in her mind, trying to show it that in how she moved, that she wasn't going to take what it wanted, that she wanted something else. Slowly, slowly, it backed up.

She moved slowly too. She bent carefully, ready to bolt if anything changed, reached into the bloody pocket without breaking their staring contest, pulled the wallet out and backed away again. The thing returned to its meal.

The trainer left, satisfied. Whoever the dead human was, they had carried a lot of money with them.

-

The trainer picked up the sound of someone nearby. The person was speaking, probably, by the pattern and tone she could pick up, swearing quietly. She couldn't make out words.

They were in a forest. There were green leafy plants covering the ground, bigger than her in most places, as well as fat-trunked trees with low branches. So it would be easy to run away and hide, and she'd be able to hear anyone chasing her.

She was pretty far from the towns and cities. The money she'd gotten had been enough to last a while, and she was curious. She'd gone this way because she wanted to see something different. She hadn't seen any sign of other people for days. Even if this one was dangerous, at least, it would only be one. She started toward the sound, smelling blood, perhaps a few hours old.

She found a boy, one who looked like he was sixteen or so, dangerously old. One leg was stuck out in front of him, the lower half reddish-brown.

The trainer guessed the boy couldn't move. Safe. It didn't matter if he saw her or not if he couldn't reach her. She slid partway out of the greenery to get a better look.

"Hey!" he said, whipping his head around to stare at her directly. "Hey, kid!"

Kid…

The child returned his stare silently, waiting.

"Yeesh, kenya talk?"

She nodded.

"Great. Quit standing around and get over here and help me!"

Uncertainly, the child shook her head. She wasn't getting close enough for him to grab her.

The boy cursed again, meaninglessly. "Look. Kid, I'm not going to hurt you. I just need you to help me out, kay? Look, it's going to rain soon. You wouldn't want to be stuck out in the rain, right?" He seemed to be waiting for a response, so she nodded slightly. "Well, I don't either. But my leg's broken and I can't move. So you've got to help me with this."

She looked at him blankly. This was something new. She sat. "Your leg's broken?" she repeated.

"Yes!" he barked, the sound tense and interesting.

"Doesn't look broken," she told him. She had seen broken things.

His teeth pressed tightly together, the lips drawn back. After a few seconds he said, "The bone's broken."

The child understood bone as well. "Okay," she said, voice amicable.

He swore again, sounding frantic and…something.

There was silence for a moment.

He sighed. "Look," he said again. "I passed a cave a little while back. It's not that far."

"How did your leg break?" she asked. She knew that if something was hurt, it usually meant there was something dangerous to her nearby. She wanted to know what that was. She was also curious – she hadn't seen something hurt like that before.

He didn't speak again for a moment. "Help me get to the cave and I'll tell you." She didn't respond. "Kid!" he said, his voice sharp and high. "Pay attention!"

"Paying attention," she told him.

"If you – okay, listen." He looked around. "See that over there?" he asked, pointing awkwardly. She looked. "That big stick. Get it and pull it over."

The child was still used to doing what people told her. She grabbed it and dragged it back. When she got closer to him, she let go and pushed it the rest of the way. His hand clutched at it the instant it came into range, as if he thought she might change her mind.

The child scrambled back, knowing he could reach further now.

He tried to stand up. Or the child assumed that was what he was trying to do – at any rate, it wasn't much, just pushing on his hands to raise himself and inch or so, then his arms shook, then gave, and he dropped back down with a soft thump against the leaf litter.

"Damn." He looked back to her. "Come on kid, I really need your help here."

She waited.

"I need you to help me up. Okay?"

"Okay," she agreed. She understood.

"So come here!" he yelled, voice tight.

The child considered. She was curious. His arms had shook and twisted, so he wasn't that strong. But…

She backed up, out of sight. She heard the boy yell, his voice high and strained. The child opened one pokeball. "Boy," she whispered, pointing. "Asked me something you watch okay?"

The sneasel made an agreeing twitch of her ear-feathers.

The child stepped back into the open space. The boy's face changed from one thing to another, but she couldn't tell what.

"Okay," she told him. "I'll help you." She walked up to him, feeling herself in front of her with a heavy arm pushing down on her shoulders for an instant, so she was prepared when he pulled on her to stand and leaned while he tried to balance with the oversized stick.

-

"How did your leg break?" the child asked.

The boy stared at her. His eyes were brown, a shade lighter than the dirt of the floor. He was sitting on the floor of what he'd called a cave. The child didn't think it was. It was a place where there was a rock hanging over the ground with space between the two. She was crouched at the edge, far enough away from him. She didn't really like how he was looking at her, but as long as he couldn't move, she thought it was okay.

He ignored her question. "What's a kid like you doing here?" he said, after a moment. "Are you a trainer?" She wasn't sure what to answer. What did he want her to be? "No," he decided, "you're too young – besides, the way you're acting – you have family around here?"

She didn't answer, and he sighed and looked away.

"How did your leg break?" the child asked.

"Look, what does it – fine. I got attacked by a bunch of rockets and they stole my pokemon, happy?" he snapped.

The child did not really understand this, and there was something buzzing and half-untrue in the boy's words. But she understood he meant people, who she thought she could avoid and she remembered the name referred to people who left quick, so she thought they wouldn't still be near there. Not that much of a danger to her.

The boy explained he'd lost his bag. It would be somewhere around where he'd been. If she could get his phone, he'd be able to call for help. The child considered and agreed to do this.

The bag she found was a backpack, with one strap broken. It was a faded black color and big, too big for her to be able to carry – the bottom would still be on the ground when she put the straps over her shoulders. The ground in front of it was trampled once, someone running but no one following. She examined it. There were no pokeballs inside, but there was some money, which she transferred to her own bag, some food – she took the dried meat, tearing at it as she went back – and a gadget that looked like ones she'd seen other children talking into. That she took back to the boy, wanting to see what he would do.

Then, when he pressed buttons and talked into it and weird voices appeared with static behind them, like she'd heard in the cities and towns before her, she left.

So that was what they were for, she thought. Or were for sometimes. She hadn't understood how it could be useful when they never seemed to be when she'd seen them before.

The child wasn't interested in what was happening now. The boy had talked and people had said they would come, so she didn't need to wait to see what would happen, and she didn't want to be there when more people appeared anyway. The boy's attention had been threatening enough, she didn't want to have that from mobile adults.

-

The trainer stopped.

The path led in a direction she didn't want to go.

The trainer had been following it for the better part of seven days. Now, however, she felt a faint, hard to describe feeling from what was ahead of her, and it grew stronger as she went.

It was an infuriating feeling, like a poorly healed cut, where all she could think of was tearing at it, ripping it apart. It made her want to lash out at something, anything at all, to get rid of it.

Instead she turned off of the path and headed south. She did not continue westward until much later, after the feeling had long faded.

-

The attack was sudden, brutal, and not entirely unexpected.

The trainer was in a crowd. She didn't want to be, hated the trapped pressed feeling of it. When she was there she wanted to tear at the people touching her, claw an open space, run.

But she was also hungry, and the stores she needed to get to were in the square, and the trainer was willing to go through a lot to get food.

She felt fingers brush the back of her neck, where her hair had fallen forward and exposed skin, and she reacted, twisting herself away as much as she could within the cramped space, away from the hand. It closed instead around a few locks of hair, jerked back, and then the other one was grasping at her.

She thrashed around wildly, moving to prevent him from getting a grip. Around her the crowd pulled away. Others grabbed at the man, pulling at him. The instant he released her she bolted, shoving through the onlookers and fighting past as they tried to stop her, hold onto her.

She waited outside the city for hours, until at least he appeared.

Looking for her. Following her.

Like they always did. Like she couldn't let happen.

She didn't show herself.

She didn't kill him; her pokemon did. They were waiting too.

-

She had entered a shop to buy supplies. It was large, with rows and rows of aisles, and organized haphazardly in her opinion, arbitrarily.

There were other people in the room, not many. One was sliding things into his bag.

She watched him carefully. He looked from side to side first, then moved closer to the shelf, partially blocking her view. He took something from the shelf, his long, baggy sleeves half-covering it, tore the round plastic girdle that circled it open, flicked off a narrow puffy band underneath, then deposited it into a brown knapsack through a narrow opening at the top, where the zipper wasn't drawn all the way up. When the bag was stuffed, he left, walking calmly through the doors and then taking off at a run.

The trainer picked up one of the bands he had dropped, examining it and then discarding it. She picked up a potion.

This she could do.

-

The trainer walked along a narrow beaten dirt path, avoiding the small patches of grass and the beginnings of bushes that were trying to reclaim the strip. It was not a main path, far from it, but enough people must have traveled it to keep the vegetation trampled down.

The area she was traveling through was mostly flat plain, covered in tall yellowish grass that reached waist-height in places, with clumps of short trees and dry, spread out scrubs in places.

The trainer didn't like the place much. It made her feel somewhat exposed. She could have hidden in the grass, but she liked to hide behind solid things and to have a hiding place that was hidden itself, not just jump into the middle of something and huddle. She moved briskly, wanting to get past it as soon as she could.

She heard noise, breathing that sounded strange, and she continued until the path wobbled and bent and she saw a black dog-thing lying on the ground. She had never seen that kind before. She examined it.

The black thing was injured, not seriously but badly. It had festering welts on its body. Its body was sunken in, like it hadn't eaten or drunk anything for a while, and its eyes were half-open. It didn't look up as she approached.

She considered for a moment, then kneeled down, lifting its head to look into its dim yellow eyes. It didn't react, eyes unfocused as if unable or unwilling to acknowledge her.

She turned, opened her pack and retrieved a disk-shaped bottle of water. She poured this down its slack throat, then released its head. She searched around on the ground for a suitable stone, broke it against another to create an edge and began sawing the welts open, watching as yellow-greenish goop oozed out. It smelled like sickness and rot. She poured more water onto those, washing it out. It still ignored her.

The trainer picked it up, stumbling slightly before she got her balance. She leaned back so that its weight stopped pulling her forward, back down, and started on her way.

-

She grew tired, stopped, still in the plains. She set the black thing down and released her houndoom. She didn't know how to light a fire, so she used the pokemon on the occasions she wanted one.

The fire she made was small, made of twisted grass and gnarled stems of bushes. She selected one such stem, slightly longer and straighter than the others, and she held onto one end as she pushed it into the fire, until it burned. She took it back out and blew out the flames on the tip, staring at the glowing embers that remained.

She then laid it on one of the opened wounds. The black thing hissed, the first reaction she'd gotten from it, and there was the slightest tightening of the muscles on its neck for a second, as if it had been about to lift its head, but then it went limp again.

The trainer was not really sure of what she was doing. She had tried washing the wounds off, but the gunk seemed connected to the flesh. To remove things that were connected, stuck, there were only two ways. She thought it would be hard to try to cut out the injuries, because they were rounded, and it was hard to carve that out again. So she thought she would try burning it off.

It took a while to finish. Several times she had to relight the stick because it had cooled. The burning had made an unpleasant smell in the air, worse than the sick, slightly rotting smell.

When she was done she set the stick down and stared at the black thing for a minute. It glared back at her.

It was finally paying attention. "Hello," she said. "Who are you?"

It snorted and looked away.

-

She did not get much more reaction from it. It stayed there and she went to sleep. She heard its breathing, still awake itself, and then it stood and she woke somewhat. She listened as it walked softly over the ground towards her, stopped, and took a deliberate breath.

Her eyes opened as it started to move toward her throat. It froze.

"Hello," she said again. "Who are you?"

It looked baffled, unable to decide what it was to do. She sat up and it backed away.

"Why hurt me?" she asked it curiously.

It didn't answer. Suddenly it jerked, snapping its head around to stare at the houndoom, who, like the trainer, had looked asleep and who, like the trainer, was now watching this scene through half-open eyes. The houndoom had not moved from where it lay.

The black thing backed further away and lay back down.

The trainer did as well. Again she closed her eyes and slept, and this time heard no pawsteps on the ground.

-

The trainer woke again after around an hour's time had passed. She took food from her bag, giving some of it to her houndoom. One piece she held out to the black thing. It didn't take it, and she moved as if to shove the food into its mouth. It pulled back slightly, but then took the food somewhat grudgingly. The trainer saw it had trouble swallowing.

She ate herself and then stood, ready to leave. She recalled the houndoom – they would run out of food before getting to the next town if she fed them much – and picked up the black thing. It struggled and growled, allowing her to hear its name.

"Umbreon," she repeated to it thoughtfully as it hissed as her with flattened ears. It flinched at the sound. She began walking and it went limp as it had when she carried it before.

She walked for hours until she grew tired and stopped. She rested, ate and drank, and she again offered some to the pokemon. This time it took them without complaint. When she stood to go again it did as well and it followed her without needing to be forced.

Thus she gained her third pokemon. There was an element of luck to this, but it must also be understood: this was not exactly uncommon.

-

The trainer was hungry.

The food she'd carried had run out two days before. There wouldn't be any more until she got to the next town, however far that might be.

The trainer understood, somewhat abstractly, that there was food of some kind to be found in places outside the cities and towns. The pokemon she saw must have gotten fed somehow, she understood this, but she didn't know what that food was or how to find it, and buying food had always been more convenient than spending time trying to figure it out.

The place she was in at the moment was rocky, barren of life. The ground was slightly yellowish and hard, littered with stones, and she picked her way between huge, jagged rocks, some two or three times her height.

Someone jumped out from behind one of those as she slid through a narrow gap, and there was a sudden pain in her side as she fell.

It was a man, not quite twenty. He was holding a knife in one hand loosely, the tip angled downward. She pushed herself back up as he rushed forward, stabbing her again. She twisted and the knife came out of his grasp and thudded against the ground. Her fingers closed on a rock from the ground and she smashed this into the side of his head once, creating a tiny splash of red. He dropped to the ground.

The trainer sank her hands into his midsection, tearing out chunks and stuffing them into her mouth.

-

"You've got an umbreon?" the other trainer asked.

The trainer was not used to people recognizing her pokemon. She nodded.

"That's too bad," he told her. "Happened to my friend as well, he told me about it. Yours evolved during an eclipse too, huh?"

The trainer didn't answer, but he didn't seem to need one. The two pokemon began fighting.

-

Noise.

Indistinct yet loud. Everywhere deafening drilling into her mind. She covered her ears automatically, but the sound didn't lessen. **Stop it.** She pressed her hands down tightly, started to dig her nails in but stopped before she drew blood.

Instead she ran, bolting over the ground until it faded.

When she stopped she looked back, locking the place into her mind. She wouldn't go there again.

But it seemed to follow her. Days passed and then the sound returned, again and again, until finally in desperation she doubled back to the nearest town. There she hid for days, and the only noise she heard came from outside herself. It would take weeks before her eyesight became normal again.

Afterward, sometimes there was murmuring, but it seemed to vanish as soon as she noticed it.

And in time, that faded.

-

The trainer wound up in a city called Fuchsia. She passed by signs proclaiming the direction of the gym without bothering to separate them out as distinct from the rest of the scene, and passed by similar signs telling her the way to the pokemon center. They didn't matter to her in the slightest.

The trainer was, however, curious about the safari zone mentioned, simply because it was something different she had not seen before. After she ate she headed to the northernmost part of the city.

The safari zone was surrounded by a high wall made of indeterminate material. It could have been polished concrete or plastic or bone; the trainer didn't really care. There was a single building, huge and square, placed in the middle of the wall, and the trainer headed inside that.

Inside were several adults, all behind counters, with bright ceiling lights illuminating the room. The trainer had not realized this, but having entered felt it would be more noticeable to leave. She continued into the room instead, handed over the amount she was asked, and accepted the bag of minimized pokeballs.

Then she was let through, and she walked out of a second set of doors into the place itself.

The trainer found it curious. She did not know what landscaping was, but she could see the place was unnatural in the way the layout reminded her of the towns she had passed through. It also looked somewhat like gardens she'd seen. The rocks didn't seem to fit into the ground properly and were uniform and level, as well as existing primarily either as tiny, almost sandy particles or else rocks her size or bigger. The trees were small and carefully maintained, pruned doggedly, and even chopped down in places. There was grass in nearly every place, even in the shadows of trees and rocks. There were also obvious paths, ones that, although the trainer did not realize it, had been cunningly designed to look to the trainers as if they were not paths.

The trainer, having not gone in based on the promises of a wild jungle, was not disappointed by this. She followed the paths for a bit, then decided to leave and look around on her own.

Immediately beyond the main paths and open areas, the Safari Zone's maintenance noticeably degraded. She had more trouble moving through them, but she was used to traveling in areas where there were no paths and did not mind.

A good while later, when the trainer was beginning to feel hungry, she was in a thicket of smooth-sided, tangled bushes collapsing over themselves under their own weight.

The trainer could hear a soft sound she didn't recognize. It was faint but regular, and she wished to find out what it was. She pushed further along, wiggling against the ground under the twigs. She came suddenly to an open space, where the branches had been bent into an arch and created a hollow large enough for the trainer to stand in. Inside this hidden place was a greenish thing. She recognized it, knowing its name before it spoke.

"Si…" it hissed, the familiar syllable made different, alien in its speech. "Ersi…"

The scyther was big, taller than she was. Its clear back wings were cracked and the top of the left was torn off, leaving a ragged edge. Its body was cracked, with gummy ichor dried on the edges. The whole of its seemed made of close-fitting, roundish chunks – there were few intact spaces larger than the trainer's hand.

The trainer cocked her head, changing the angle of her view. "Hello," she said.

The scyther didn't answer her. She didn't move. After a moment it twitched one limb, an action that caused more semi-clear ichor to seep out, in a dismissive gesture.

"You're going to die?" the trainer said, because it was not hard to tell. "Want to?" She didn't know quite how to talk to it.

"Ither…" It wasn't talking to her.

"Come with me maybe?"

It didn't respond.

"Interesting," she tried to explain. "Not…acting something strange. So, come with me?"

After a while, it did.

-

The trainer's hand was trapped.

She'd been walking on a path that crossed mountains. It had been somewhat steep. The trail was narrow and rocky, cutting into the side of the rock so that beside her was an almost vertical wall of stone, and then the wall of the mountain on her left had burst toward her in pieces, the chunks of rock hitting her before she could escape.

One large rock had pinned her hand, the weight crushing it. The trainer was trying to pull her hand free without success. With small debris was still settling around her, the tiny fragments landing and then trickling down between the larger rocks with a sound not unlike footsteps on gravel and her attention focused releasing her injured hand, she did not notice the approach.

"Not making any noise?" a voice asked her.

The graveler by his side told her how he'd done it. The man himself was young enough, some age below thirty. His face had a strange look to it.

"You should be crying," he told her. "Or screaming. It hurts, doesn't it hurt? It should hurt." He walked closer to her, descending as he stepped from the rocks to the ground by her. He kicked her once in the side, knocking her back so that her arm, trapped in place, burned with pain as it was wrenched and twisted.

The man looked distantly confused. "Odd." He bent slightly over her to look closer. "Are you trying to be quiet? You don't look it. No, you don't look it." He straightened. Looking up at him, the trainer saw he seemed to be considering her. "Like a robot. A moving mannequin." He reached down towards her with his left hand.

Her eyes snapped fully open and her lips drew back to show her teeth. She hissed.

His hand pulled back slightly. Behind him, she saw the graveler rock backward. She pulled her hand free with a convulsive jerk, cradling it against her chest, and backed up herself, getting a few feet of space between her and them. She pulled loose a pokeball from her waist and opened it.

It was all over in a few seconds, and then she dealt with her hand, carefully licking the blood off, straightening the twisted fingers and bandaging it to keep them that way. When she was done she recalled her pokemon and continued on her way.

-

The trainer started to see things oddly, like her eyes were too far open. Sometimes there were people she met who seemed to have another something layered over them, a thin filmy thing she couldn't see directly, something shimmery and insubstantial.

This grew slowly until one day, inside a city, she saw a man.

He himself was nothing striking – he had narrow eyes and was shorter than the men who surrounded him, and his face was one of untruths and arrogance.

But that was not what the trainer found important. What was significant was that he was surrounded by something brown-grey and rotten and seething, something she could see clearly wasn't there but yet she could still see it quite clearly all the same. She closed her eyes and the second thing faded, but not as fast as the first image, a fraction of a second late, like it wasn't the same thing.

The trainer liked being able to close her eyes, block off images. Noise grew almost overwhelming at times in the cities, but sight at least she could limit. She did not want this extra thing, the flicker, the distraction. She tried not to look, ignored it, focused on trying to make it go away.

And slowly, like it had appeared, the extra haziness that wasn't quite there faded away and vanished.

-

She was standing on hard white tile and bristling internally at the bright overhead lights and their unending humming noise. The gatekeeper was arguing with her, about badges. She needed eight to get in, and if she couldn't show eight, she couldn't enter.

Why?

Because the pokemon were dangerous. She didn't care she'd be fine. Those were the rules they couldn't be argued with. She did.

Once she was certain he was not going to let her through, she left, walking silently out over the cold polished floor.

The building had no windows, so she did not try to get out of sight of it before crawling through the bramble bushes blocking her. She ignored the scratches as the thorns tore at her arms and face. Thorns left rough cuts, nothing she needed to pay attention to.

The gatekeeper had thought she wanted to go through because of bravado, confidence. She had felt his discomfort at her meek behavior. Meek had worked before, inside cities, with adults who looked at her too closely and asked questions. Next time she wanted to go someplace they thought was dangerous, she'd act more confident, prideful, like they wanted. She knew how to do that, she'd seen trainers act that way when confronted with restrictions.

She hadn't tried to explain why she wanted to get in. The idea of simply explaining to someone her reasons had never occurred to her, although in this case it wouldn't have mattered. Telling him she intended to steal from the trainers inside would not have made him let her in.

She was good at judging how much money trainers carried, as she was good at judging how hard of a fight it would be, and how likely it was they would be upset and try not to pay her. She knew trainers like the ones she'd seen enter had a lot of money. She was running low herself – her sneasel's arm had been snapped in a fight, and that was expensive to fix. She wanted to get money fast.

Beyond the barrier, the place was strange and barren. The dirt was thin and rocky, the plants weedy. It was quiet, too, with a lack of the normal small pokemon who made up most of a forest's population. Off in the distance she could hear pounding echoing thought the ground. Ponyta.

The trainers here were experienced, with pokemon strong enough to kill her. She hadn't thought about it, but had she, she would have known this. It hadn't mattered to her, wasn't important in this case. What was important was how fast they could chase her, and how observant they were when battling.

Her scyther appeared before them and they released a pokemon in response. Trainers like them tended to have evolved pokemon, often big ones. They focused on the battle intensely.

Too intensely. She waited until something happened – a pokemon striking the earth and creating a mild shockwave, an attack that went close, something – then snuck up and fished out a wallet from behind, while the trainer was doing the strange useless thing they did where they focused so very much on the fight and their body was still ringing with aftershocks so they wouldn't feel it so easily. Then she ran off, her scyther vanishing back into the trees.

It took time to do properly, to wait for the right moment, but she was patient. And the amount of money she got was far more than she could ever get from battles in the same amount of time.

She could only do it a few times before her scyther was too tired to keep going. She recalled him and started back.

But then, on a whim, she headed northward. There, nestled between the exposed roots of a tree, she found a greenish thing, rounded and almost rocklike. It was somehow slightly off, the tint of its color faintly different than the surroundings, the pattern almost but not quite blending into the ground.

She reached for it and it twitched under her touch, warmer than stone. The trainer picked it up and after a minute it tentatively unrolled, looking up at her with round black eyes. "Vi!" it eeped, rolling up again.

The trainer had never seen something like it before. "How did you get here?" she asked. The thing in her hands quivered and curled tighter at her voice. "This isn't where you're from, is it." No response.

She stood up with the thing cradled in her arms, looked around for any other sign, and finding none, left.

-

The trainer was walking down a path through an overgrown forest. She paused to brush a strand of hair from her face and


	6. Luck

It's tempting to end the story here.

-

Luck

-

The room was dark.

This was the second thing she noticed. The first thing was that she was lying on the floor there, and the third was that her head hurt.

She tried to push herself up and fell. She couldn't seem to tell which way was up, and her head was throbbing, so strong she couldn't feel herself, where her arms and legs were. She touched her left hand to her head and felt something dry, hard, crumbling under her fingers. That explained why her head hurt, but not why she couldn't get up or what was wrong with her eyes.

The floor was cold, neither rough nor smooth. She felt around and found her pokeballs were missing. After a while she managed to sit up.

She waited.

Time passed and the door opened. Two figures stood there, looking like twin poles. One was taller than the other. The light behind them was bright and painful, but the child thought that might have only been because of her eyes. She narrowed her eyes to slits and tried to bring them into focus, but failed. She stared past them at the wall, and found she could see them best that way.

"You're coming with us," one said. A girl, thirteen or so, tense. On the right side.

Obediently the child stepped forward. The other one tried to grab her but she dodged, the hand's motion making it clearer to her for a moment.

They walked with her between them, the girl who had spoken in the back. The child didn't like having someone behind her, especially when she was already feeling trapped in the corridor. There was nothing she could do though, so she waited.

The one in front stopped by a wall, pushed it open to reveal a darker square, and then stood aside. The girl behind shoved her forward. "In."

The child stumbled. It was harder to keep her balance when she couldn't see properly and felt so strange, like she couldn't feel down. The door shut, the sound making her think it was metal. Had the child been given to such things, she might have compared the resounding clang to the closing of a tomb. She was not. Instead she tried to decipher the room.

There was another person, about half a foot taller than her. Its breathing was low and based on that and how thick of a column she saw, she decided it was probably a larger adult, sitting. There was something between them, something brown and rectangular she realized was a desk.

"Well," he said. From his voice the child thought his face might have had the sort of feigned half-smile of someone about to kick something because it was smaller. The child felt better. It would be okay if someone like that hit her, they didn't do real damage.

"You're the property of Team Rocket now," he told her.

This wasn't true. She didn't belong to them. She waited.

"Any attempt to –" he started, and his voice didn't sound at all important.

"Where are my pokemon?" the child interrupted.

"That's not your concern."

"I want my pokemon."

"You'll get pokemon assigned to you once you prove your loyalty."

Loy-al-ty. Loya-lty. Lo-yalty. Loyalty. The child echoed the word in her head. She hadn't heard it before. How did one…? But she dropped the tangent, deciding it wasn't important.

"I want my pokemon," she repeated.

There was a smashing sound and blurry motion. He'd hit the desk, the child decided. He might have expected her to flinch. She couldn't tell; it was hard when she couldn't see his face or posture. "You won't be getting them," he told her, his voice irritated and angry. "They'll be given to someone else."

Lie.

"Why?"

"Because you don't get pokemon back." He was getting upset. His voice was…something. The child wanted to get away. People who sounded like that could hurt her, really hurt her. "Especially not these. They're actually worth something-" His voice cut off.

_Worth something_. A multitude of faces sprang up inside her head. People when they saw her pokemon. People when they saw another pokemon. _Really rare_. Her pokemon were rare. So they were worth something.

"They'll – they'll be turned over to be redistributed to higher ranked trainers," the man said. He sounded like he was trying to convince her. "That's my job, that's what –"

"You're lying," the child said.

He didn't speak for seconds.

"I want my pokemon back."

"What the hell are you talking about, lying!" he shouted at her, angry and something else.

"About my pokemon." She heard him breathe in suddenly, a hissing sound. "They don't belong to you. They're mine."

"Legit," he hissed under his breath, sounding relieved. She wondered if she was supposed to respond. When he spoke again his voice was free of the…something she couldn't recognize. "You won't be getting them back. Drop it."

"You have them," the child said. "Give me them."

"I told you," the man said. He was angry again. "You won't –"

"Give me them," she repeated.

"They belong to Team Rocket now."

Lie.

"They're mine," she explained. "They aren't yours. They won't do what you want."

The man laughed as if she'd told a joke. Not nicely, but a real laugh. She waited. "Stupid kid," he told her. "You have any idea how many stupid kids have told me that?" The child waited. "You want to tell me why?" he said, voice mocking. "Why they won't do what they're told?"

"Because they like me," she said. "They don't like you."

The man laughed harder. She heard wood scraping, the sound of a drawer opening. A red and white blotch appeared. "You know, they won't care if you're a bit damaged. Hell, scrawny little thing like you, odds are you're doing downstairs trainer or not. And after that shit you just pulled, you deserve it. Almost had me thinking you were a plant you little brat." He laughed again. "Let's see how loyal your pokemon is to some dumb kid."

There was a pop, a flash of light. The child watched as the white of Apocalypse's teeth sank into his midsection, and feathery tufts of blood appeared. She walked up to where the man was and tugged at the pokeball in his hand until it came loose, unbothered by the screams.

She didn't belong to them. They should know better than to try to take things that didn't belong to them.

-

The door opened.

The child stood calmly, holding one pokeball with both hands. She was standing in a pool of blood.

The person made a surprised noise and held still a moment.

"What – what happened?" the woman said, sounding upset. "Are you –?"

The child held up the pokeball, her hands cupped tightly around it. "He let this one out," she said. She moved both arms as she lifted it, not wanting to loosen her grip. She was having trouble holding onto it. Her fingers were smudged red.

"My god," she said. Then after a moment, "Come out."

The child stepped forward. Her eyes were still acting funny, and she didn't like the brighter light of the corridor, but she didn't want to stay locked inside the room.

"It's okay," the woman was saying. "You don't need to hold it shut."

Hold it…the child looked down. Her hands around the pokeball. She could barely seem it but she could make the image in her mind and realized what the woman meant. She wasn't doing that but she didn't correct the woman. She didn't know what the woman wanted her to say yet.

"You don't need to be scared," the woman said. "Here, give it to me, I'll take it away."

The child backed away as she reached out. The woman held still a moment, then her arm dropped down. "It's okay," she said again. "I'm not going to hurt you."

The child didn't answer.

"I – you haven't been – back there – did he ask you any questions? I'm sorry."

"No," the child told her. "He didn't ask me anything."

"He was the first one you met?"

"Yes," the child said.

"I'm sorry," she said again, "but you have to come with me to see someone else. He would have – sent you to them. They decide where you go.

"I'm sorry," she said again.

-

The man snapped his fingers in front of her face. "Damn it, where are they getting these kids?"

The other was typing. His hands were out of the child's sight but she recognized the sound.

"Look at this," he grumbled, waving his hand in front of her face. "I've seen more expressive lumps of ice. Blind. Probably dull intelligence at best. Who grabbed her? Because they're idiots. Put that in. What do they expect me to do with an eight year old?"

"I'm not eight."

The man blinked. She could see the motion. "The brat speaks. You're a scrawny undersized nine year old, then." He turned to the typer. "Which group is Samuel in charge of? Assign her there."

"Still mad about that?"

"You think I shouldn't be? Bastard thinks he can mess with me. He thinks my job's unnecessary, he can deal with the results. Watch his promotion go down the tubes."

"He does outrank you," the other one said.

"So? What's he gonna do? This job's so unimportant, surely it couldn't have any effect on him. What's he gonna do?"

"Shoot you. Again."

"Don't be such a coward. He missed, anyway. Almost." The man turned back to her. "Name?" She didn't answer. She was sitting quietly, her hands in her lap. The pokeball under them was out of his sight. He shrugged finally. "We'll find out soon enough. No point in trying to hide it." She was still quiet, so he shrugged again and turned back to the second man. "She listed as having any pokemon?"

"Nope."

"Thought you said she was a trainer."

"That's what it says. A pair under Joseph brought her in."

"So? That guy doesn't mess with some brat's rattata. She couldn't have been carrying anything that'd even make him pause – hey, you sure that file's current? Joseph should've finished fixing it by now. She's either a trainer with pokemon or she's not. The guy's not dumb enough to leave something that obvious."

"He did this time."

"Whatever," the man said. "Not my problem. Call someone to take her down, would'ja?"

-

She wound up at a room. It was big but full, brimming. Stacks of beds were arranged in rows and girls were sitting, crowded, on the edges. They turned to her.

The light was more tolerable now. Her eyes had improved somewhat, enough for her to make out expressions.

One of the larger girls approached. She examined the child, her eyes catching suddenly on the pokeball in one hand. "What are you doing with that?" she demanded. "You shouldn't have those. Give me them."

The child backed up as the girl approached, into the closed door. The girl held out her hand, looking annoyed. "Give them to me."

The child shook her head slightly.

"Julie, leave her alone. It's probably just a pidgey or something, let her keep it."

The girl ignored the advice. She came closer. She tried to pull the pokeball from the child's hands and couldn't. After a moment of tugging she made a frustrated sound and shoved the child, who lost her balance and banged against the ground at an angle. Another pokeball opened.

Eclipse.

The child's houndoom had seen only one, so she had attacked. But the umbreon was confronted with a roomful and no clear opponent. She growled intimidating instead, stepping forward.

Several of the other girls had moved their hands reflexively to their waists. The nearest girl looked surprised, but not mostly, and then that was forced off her face somewhat. "You think your pet scares me?" She reached toward the umbreon, then screamed as Eclipse bit, starting to shake her head and tear.

"No," the child said, tugging the umbreon's side. "More than, more than." The umbreon released her grip and backed up.

The child felt trapped but she couldn't see a way out. She considered a moment, then recalled the umbreon and watched.

One of the other girls had produced a white cloth roll and was wrapping the first's hand. "Hold still, Julie," she was saying.

Another girl approached. "Hi," she said. "Don't be scared." She held out her hand flat, somewhat like one might do to a dog. "What's your name?" After a moment, she said, "Julie's really not mean, she's just worried about following the rules. If somebody gets in trouble we all do. But it's really okay, if your pokemon's not really strong anyway, it's okay for pets."

"Sara, that wasn't a pet!" The first girl sounded angry. "I don't know how she could have gotten something like that but we've got to give it back before they find out!"

"Oh, come on," the girl said, putting her hand on the child's head, who froze. "Look at her. She's not a trainer."

The others stared at her. "She doesn't look old enough," another said.

"See, Julie. She's not a trainer. It'll be okay."


	7. Children

Children

-

People talked to her, their voices helpful and deceptive. The girl who had first interfered with the other explained she would live in the room until they decided to put her somewhere else, and that she had to be very, very good. The girl did not explain why. She was smiling falsely, painfully.

The others were looking at her, curious and dangerous. Some of them had expressions the child remembered seeing on the faces of children looking at fish behind glass. She wanted to get away before they decided to tap.

The girl was asking meaningless questions as she talked. "How did you get that pokemon?" she said. "That was an umbreon, wasn't it?"

"I found it," the child said, which was the best answer. Her eyes had mostly returned to normal. She still did not understand what had been wrong with them, but it was becoming less important now that it was no longer current.

"I'm surprised your parents let you keep it," the girl said, her voice staying the same speed, a babble filled up the silence and was just slow enough not to sound anxious. "But that's good, you'll have something with you. You're lucky you managed to hold onto them."

"Lucky," the child repeated, finding the word odd.

"Most of us don't get to keep our pokemon. We get some assigned to us later instead. Did they take any of yours?"

The child did not want to explain. "I have all of them with me," she said, which was answering the question in one sense and not the other.

"Anyway, don't be scared," she said again. She said the phrase at every pause, to fill up silence. "It'll be okay, don't worry."

-

The child did not find the new place she was in particularly hard to understand. There was an odd sound under the other girl's voices, though, so she watched them closely, waiting for any threat, but nothing more unpleasant than being picked up happened. They thought she was a child.

They seemed curious about her, in the oddly not-dangerous way the child remembered from the two children who had asked her pokemon's names.

There weren't any windows, so the child did not know the time, or how much passed. Presently the door unlocked from the outside again and the other girls scrambled up.

"Come on," one told her. "You must be hungry by now."

The child had never understood the 'by now' in that phrase. She was usually hungry. She made no effort to ask about this. They herded her out, keeping her near the center, as if they didn't want her getting lost, or perhaps seen.

She could see better now. The hallways were slightly larger than she was used to, although, she thought, somewhat small for the size of the group currently traveling them. The ground, which earlier she had noticed was not as hard under her feet as something truly solid, appeared to be made up of a thin sort of carpeting, dark in color with a hint of red. The lighting was much dimmer than she was used to in other buildings, but was bright enough she thought it was adequate for them to see by – she did not think she would be able to travel around without being seen.

They went through several hallways, turned left, right, and left again. They passed doors, some of which the child could hear faint sounds behind, often people talking and sometimes others she couldn't identify. They came to an open room with brighter lights and large tables, and the child narrowed her eyes, which were still sensitive. The group moved to one table, moving her with them.

"Who's getting food?" someone asked.

"I'll go," offered a blonde-haired girl. "How about you come with me, Jamie?" Another girl nodded.

"I'll go too," said a third, and they left the group, looking about them as if uncertain.

"We have a couple people get us all food," explained the girl next to the child. The child did not understand why they kept explaining things, or why they kept explaining things that she had just seen. "Um, it's the way a lot of people here do it, especially ones like us, well, because…"

"Sometimes the food is poisoned," said another girl. The first glared. "What? She's gotta learn sometime."

"You don't need to worry about that," said the first, and the child wondered why they kept saying that. Their voices were strange, humming and uncertain. "It's just, sometimes, people get mad at someone, so, maybe, if that person went up to get food, people might put something in it maybe. But if a couple people get food for everybody, then they don't know who's eating what and they won't make everybody sick, so they don't do anything." The girl's voice was falsely certain, as if she were trying to convince the child. "It's not going to matter, don't worry, nobody'd do it to you." She sounded more confident of this. "You don't need to worry, the food's fine."

The food was fine. It was palatable and there was enough of it. The child ate cautiously, watching them to make sure she wasn't eating too much.

Not too much times passed and then the group stood again and left. They began to retrace the route they'd taken.

They came upon an adult going in the other direction. He was dressed in black with a red twisted line on the chest, just like all the girls. He paused, looked at the child, pointed. A girl next to her gripped the child's arm. "Why isn't she in uniform?"

"She just got here," said one of them.

"That's no excuse. You know the rules."

"It's not our fault," said the girl who had tried to take the child's pokemon. There was something unrecognizable underlying her voice. "We've been in our room, we can't go-" The man hit her in the face, knocking her down.

"Go get her a uniform," he said flatly, and then he continued on.

"Julie, you okay?" asked one, helping the girl up.

"Fine. We've got to hurry, though." She looked worried. "You guys go back, I'll bring her."

"Sampson, please!" The girl's voice was pleading and high. "We don't have time. Just let us in and we'll get it and be gone."

"If you're supposed to be doing this, don't see why you're in such a hurry," said a voice behind the half-opened door almost lazily.

"Come on, you know it's not like that! Clement told us to!"

"No concern to me."

"Janie's not with us now, she's out!" The girl's voice was fast and high, was…something. "Just open the door, we don't have anything for you!"

"Which is the root of your problem."

The girl turned. "I'm sorry," she mumbled quickly, grabbing the child and shoving her in front. "Look, isn't she cute?" she said, her voice too fast. "She needs a uniform, you don't wanna get her in trouble."

The man made a sort of laugh in the back of his throat, amused. The door opened somewhat and the girl moved inside so fast they stumbled and almost fell.

The man was looking at the child, who was frozen in place by the eyes and the girl's grip just below her shoulders. She slid her hands smoothly behind her back, kept her eyes lowered.

A moment passed. The man made a second sound, looked up. "Tiny. She really assigned? Seems like she should –"

"Don't say it!" The girl's fingers tightened almost painfully, digging into the child's arms.

He looked unconcerned. "Whatever. Don't have stuff that'll fit."

"We'll be okay." The girl turned her head, glanced quickly at the door. She was agitated. "Just hurry up, would you?"

The man shrugged, turned. He pulled on the wall, and it slid to the side, exposing shelves of black cloth. He picked something from the bottom and tossed it at them. The girl caught it.

"Clothing's counterfeit. You've got to turn it in here," he said.

The girl handed it to the child. "Here," she said, and pointed. "Go over there. You can change behind the screen."

"I did let you in," the man said, voice calm but humming dangerously underneath.

"Leave her be! She's just a little kid."

The child was behind the screen, so she could not see them. She was pulling the shirt over her head. She heard a sound that was like a shrug. "She's here now," the man said. The sleeves reached past her hands, and the bottom of the shirt halfway to her knees.

"I'll tell Janie," she said, angry and something.

The sound again. "Fine," he said, and the dangerous sound had faded.

The child transferred her pokeballs to her new clothes and walked out. The girl grabbed her hand and pulled her out quickly. Back in the hallway she stopped suddenly, looked down at the child. "Your poke – you remembered to take – you didn't forget –" she started to say.

"Have them," the child said, not understanding how she could have forgotten. The less she understood what they wanted her to say, the less she wanted to say.

The girl's breath came out suddenly. "Good." She bent so they were at eye level, but she wasn't really looking at the child. "Listen, you can't let anybody else know you've got those. It'd be really bad. Okay?"

"Said I had to get rid of them," the child said, not understanding.

The girl sighed. "I'm sorry, I won't get rid of them. But you can't let anybody find out or they'll take them, okay?"

"Okay," the child said. Take them. Why would they do that? That had already happened. But she didn't ask.

-

Some of the others began to do something pointless with pieces of hard paper, a game. They explained the rules to her in fragments, and she looked attentive enough, as if she had not already seen people play it. People explaining were completely harmless. Their attention was focused inside, thinking, so the child could be sure they were not watching her.

They were trying to make her stay in one place. One of the girls had cut the sleeves shorter and was trying to tie down the edges with a thin piece of metal and something like a fiber from a string, but more supple and a different color. She kept repeating, stay still, stay still, over and over again, even though the child was not moving. The stack of paper dwindled and was rebuilt several times.

There was noise at the door, pieces of metal clicking and rubbing against each other. It opened. The girls in the room suddenly stopped, their attention attracted. There was something in their faces, mixed with readiness, wariness, as if they were expecting something dangerous. This vanished when the door opened.

The girl who entered was around sixteen, perhaps even as old as seventeen. There were only a handful of girls inside the room of that age.

"Janie!" said one of those girls, standing. "You're back early."

She nodded, smiled. "Wasn't half as hard as they expected," she said, sounding slightly proud. Her eyes caught on the child. "Who's she?"

"New," said the girl by her. "She's only just even got her uniform, we got her in normal clothes. Julie had to take her when someone saw."

"And Sampson gave me trouble because you weren't around. You've got to get him to stop that. _Clement's_ the one who noticed her and it'd have been really bad if he thought we were ignoring orders."

"He did? Dammit, he said – I'll tell him." She brushed back strands of hair, her hands partially hiding her face for a moment. "We're under Samuel, you'd think…"

-

"What? But – are you sure that's right?"

The man looked at her, expression dour. His eyes were a disinterested brownish grey, like stones. "That's what it says. Pretty clear. Missing the name, though. What is it?" The last part was only nominally a question. It was clear he was not at all interested in the answer.

"She–" The girl's eyes flickered to the side. "– she hasn't said."

"You think you could get her to say now?" Annoyance had crept into his voice, hard and dangerous.

"She's just a kid!" she burst out.

"So you're saying she's not of any use. That I should –"

"Stop it! She just got here, she hasn't even slept! She doesn't have any idea what's happening. You can't take –"

The man flicked the paper in his hand, irritated, and her mouth shut with a snap.

"Fine," she said after a moment, turning to the child. She bent down and said softly. "Listen, you have to do what they say. Whatever you do, don't disobey them. And don't run. Promise me, don't run."

The child did not want to make any such promise. The man had grabbed her by the arm and was pulling her roughly through the doorway.

"Please," the girl said behind her. "Promise you won't run."


	8. Trial Run

He released her arm in front of a door, opened it. The man was frustrated-annoyed, not at her but she understood that was not important. She imagined him grab her arm again and jerk, her legs hitting the ground too hard as she stumbled, so she stepped inside quickly before it happened. The man shoved her from behind but the force was less and she caught her balance easily. Then the door shut again and she was trapped.

She was the smallest. There were other children, some who were younger than her and three boys who were eldest, one who looked around fifteen and the other two around thirteen. They had guns. The other children's ages ranged between ten and twelve. They were looking around themselves as if they were not sure what was happening and had no visible pokeballs or pokemon or knives. The child assumed they had been recently acquired. The eldest began talking as if he were in charge.

The room was not large. The children and she were crowded in but not quite cramped. This was probably a good thing. The child didn't like the eldest's voice. It had a surface-calm sound to it, like it would shatter if something happened, and the boy's eyes were darting around. He probably wouldn't have taken it well if any were closer to him.

The eldest was talking. His words wandered, sounding tense and short but taking a long time to divulge information. The child focused on the others, trying to glean information for what she was supposed to do. One of the uncertain children, a bigger one perhaps twelve who had an unmarked face, had an odd sort of belligerence in his expression, and a sort of interest in what was said. The other younger children seemed more unfocused and the child could not decide what they might do exactly, but at the same time did not feel it would be important.

The second-biggest challenged nothing the eldest said, and snapped at one of the two girls, the older one with a small bandage on her temple, when she asked a question. But there was a playacted feel about his actions that was odd, and the child did not understand what he was intending.

"But what if –" a boy with a bruise on his jaw tried to say. The second-biggest hit him and told him to shut up, he didn't have a choice.

The child did not say anything, but when the eldest finished talking he looked at her and spoke angrily, waving a hand in front of her face. He was looking at her as he spoke but it was obvious he was not speaking to her. He complained that she was a worthless dumb brat and she'd just slow them down, probably she'd make noise and get them all caught, she was worse than nothing. He said, "I might as well just shoot you now."

The child waited, because his words were empty and untrue and nothing in his posture suggested he was a threat. He hit her and told her to always speak when someone spoke, which was also empty and untrue.

"Okay," she told him, and he hit her again and was done.

He spoke to the other children, threatening a boy with a bruise on his face who asked about being caught and the maybe-twelve boy who asked why they were doing this. Then he seemed satisfied and directed them out a different way, up a flight of stairs, then told them to wait outside a second door and entered, closing it firmly behind him.

Inside the child heard his voice change to be subservient and respectful, heard another voice respond.

The maybe-twelve boy was examining everyone in turn. The child disliked when people did that because it meant they would get to her. After a moment, the boy started to reach out as if to prod her and opened his mouth.

The door opened. The boy pulled back and closed his mouth again. The eldest encouraged them inside.

A tall man a shade away from gaunt was trying to fit a key into a hole. The lock was huge and ill cared for. It held the door of a large cage shut. Behind the bars was a large bird with huge wings and a long neck and beak. The child recognized it. The fearow snapped at the man, but the lock – probably for that reason – was on a metal square large enough to position it and him out of reach. There was metal on the fearow's neck. There was metal strapped above one of the man's knees.

When the door opened the fearow immediately snapped at the younger girl, taking a chunk from her left wrist. Blood splattered into the ground and the other fearow began cawing.

The man swore and kicked the door shut again so the fearow was forced back in. Holding it in place with one heel, he pulled out a white cloth and pressed it against her wrist. The girl made a pained expression and tried to pull back, and the blood stopped. She was whimpering, her eyes watching the bird.

"Why're you bothering," the boy said, his voice false-calm. "Not like it matters." The man backhanded him in an almost lazy motion, knocking him against the wooden drawers of the other side.

"Worthless brat!" he snapped, and with the same hand waved in a wide gesture that took in all of the cages on the wall. The fearow were crowing and flapping their wings. "You want them in a blood frenzy? What do you think they eat? You keep your eye on your stupid kids if you're supposed to be in charge. Worthless." He tied the white cloth on with a bandage, jerking the knot tight, then pushed her backward and opened the cage again.

The fearow looked at them calculatingly but after a moment headed in the other direction to wait by a metal door without any handle.

The man looked them over, his expression familiar. He was counting in the strange way adults did. He paused at her a moment and gained a derisive smile. Deliberately he looked from her to the oldest boy. "Wha'd you do to piss someone off so bad?"

"It's not my fault!" The boy's cheeks were flushed slightly in anger.

"Heh. Then maybe it's just a mistake." He laughed as if the idea was funny. "She's downstairs material for sure." He turned his head a bit to look at her again. "What, not scared of going downstairs?"

"I don't know what that means," the child said.

"Aw, your Cell didntell you?" His speech was becoming odd, like it had been said before. "Downstairs is where the little kids like you go." His eyes flickered up to the fifteen year old just long enough for the boy to notice. "And the worthless screwups. Then they cut you into little itty bitty pieces, or they feed you poison, or they just leave you in a cage 'n forget all about you. Unless somebody decides you'd be a fun little toy. Even those wimps gotta have some fun."

The child stared at him blankly. The man sighed, leaning back. He looked around at the others and seemed more satisfied then. He didn't say anything more. Instead he returned to opening cages.

The fearow hissed and snapped and raised their wings, but the child noticed they made no real effort to attack the group and moved down the corridor without prompting. She also noticed how they waited there together, metamorphosing into a connected group the moment they reached the door without a handle. Together, they eyed the girl with the bandage on her wrist. The girl was no longer bleeding, but it did not matter, and the child thought that perhaps the man had not realized this.

The child did not like things acting the same or together. They were not focused on her, but she understood they could be. She stayed back.

The man shut the door of a cage hard, so that the metal bounced loudly against itself. The fearow still in cages let out loud cries, and the fearow not in cages remained silent. Then he pressed something in the device on his leg, and the door without a handle opened. The air that blew inside smelled of outside, and the child understood.

"Move it," the eldest snapped. He wanted to leave the man who kept saying things he didn't like. He hit one of the children who was walking a bit slower than the others.

Outside, the sun had mostly set. There was a small half-circle of lighter sky in the west, but nothing more. The flat platform the children and she were standing on was already lit by bright lights that burned into her eyes.

The eldest was still angry. "Get on." He had gotten on the back of one of the fearow. The child could see one hand near the joint of a wing, holding a handful of feathers to keep him steady.

The other children had trouble with the command. They circled the fearow at a distance to avoid the beak, but the fearow turned with them, wings half-open. The three older boys made no effort to help them.

The child looked to one of the fearow. "Let me on not pull feathers?" she tried. She held her fingers together to make her hands smaller because the other children had splayed their fingers.

The fearow stopped hissing. It cocked its head.

"Okay?"

After a moment of thought, the fearow folded its wings and settled slightly onto the ground. The child approached it cautiously. She placed her hands on its back and pushed to lift herself up. Under her hands, the feathers were soft, different from the spearow she'd picked up. To hold on, she reached her arms around its neck and settled them under the metal against the uppermost breast, where the bone was solid.

She waited. The eldest waited as well, but the second and third biggest began to help the last of the children, hitting one in frustration at his slowness before doing so. Then the fearow beat their wings and flew.

The child did not like or dislike it. It was windy mainly, cold offset by the feathers and energy of the fearow. Below her was dimly interesting, in that she had never seen it like this before, but not important. She thought falling would be bad, but did not much care about that either, as she felt she could hold on. Very remotely, she understood there were other air-things, that something could happen and the bird would fall, but it was too unlikely and too incomplete and she could not marshal much caring.

Below were forests and buildings and plains repeating, and then the fearow the eldest rode began to sink down. The other fearow did as well. Shortly after, they landed in a small clearing surrounded by trees and underbrush.

The child climbed off the feathered back and stepped out of range of various beaks. Another, a boy, was not quick enough. The child heard him yell and the smell of blood burst into the calm night air.

The eldest muttered wordlessly, the sound irritated. He grabbed the injured boy by his arm, dragging him roughly a few steps away and then pressing a white strip against the bleeding area between the boy's wrist and elbow, prompting another cry. The fearows' heads bobbed excitedly. They shifted on their talons, wings opening partway as if to entrap.

"Idiot!" the eldest said, cuffing the injured boy over the head and then turning to the others, no longer interested. "Okay. Everyone, shut up. We're here to do something and we're going to do it. Got it? So shut up and listen." He was still but full of restrained motion, radiating danger. "There's something here we're getting. Collecting. A museum display. Now – any of you screw up, alarms go off and everybody suffers, so don't, got it? And don't even think of running or something stupid like that. You'll just get shot."

The child thought of the sound of a gunshot, the sound of an alarm. There was truth in his words, but she thought he would not be quick to shoot. He'd have to run back himself, back to the angry birds, back to someone angry. She knew he did not want to fail. He was trying to wrap them up in this, make them share his goal.

"Now." He took a breath, deliberate, he pointed with one hand. "Let's go."

-

The building they were to enter was in a pretty area where the high oval lights that hung over streets were a translucent mix of dull white and darkness, where the windows were black squares on dark buildings, where the humming of machines had been silenced. The child heard the children whispering and murmuring to themselves unhappy and something, quiet to not disturb the quiet.

Perhaps it was because of this they were not seen. That, and the buildings around were not houses, and the place they were in had been small when she had seen it from the fearow's back. She did not feel exposed but felt a sort of thoughtful awareness of it. If something happened, she would bolt and hide. The group, though, walked unbothered through chance. It was perhaps unlikely anyone would come. Despite this, she found it odd that there would be no protection against such a thing. But she would bolt and hide, and it did not matter much what happened to the group.

The sidewalks were flat, light colored, the individual squares unbroken and level. Some of the children stumbled. One fell and made whining noises before the second-eldest pulled him to his feet and hissed angrily at him.

And the fence was an ornament, unpleasant in concept even if it made the situation easier. Made of black metal – pretty, her thoughts whispered – arranged in poles ending in sharp tips like spears, with two long horizontal strips of the same metal at the top and bottom to connect them. The child was small and yet if she stood on the bottom strip as if it were a step she could reach up easily to the upper, and so scale the fence without much trouble. Even this would be unnecessary, because the fence was incomplete, ending several feet away from the paved entrance on either side, with no gates that could be closed to fix this.

The eldest led the group in through this, the front and most exposed place, and it occurred to her that he was in the front and observant and disregarding, and that he had reached much the same decision on why it did not matter that the group could be so easily exposed. Understanding this his choice made sense to her, and she no longer thought it odd or turned it around in her mind.

They did not go up the steps to the door. Instead they circled around the building, over spongy soft grass the child did not like walking on.

"Wish the lights were on," said one of the children to the others softly, more to himself than anything. He was staring up at the dark face of the nearest one, the grid over it giving it the appearance of an insect eye.

"Idiots," hissed the eldest in much the same tone, his voice wafting over the group like cold air. "The lights go on, everyone sees us. We don't want them on. Idiots." He came to a small side door with an unlocked padlock dangling through the latch. He lifted it out and opened the door. "Move it."

Inside was darker. Several of the children whined quietly. One stopped and the second eldest hit him from behind.

"Why are we here?" said the maybe-twelve boy. Seeming to expect it, he managed to duck most of the slap.

The boy with bruises on one side of his neck stumbled, falling into and past the red cloth strip barrier, into a case hard enough to crack the glass. He made a soft pained sound but seemed to have learned from the other children, getting up quickly before any of the three had the chance to become angry.

One of the side rooms had a window. There were more light there. Five-sided glass boxes had been placed over various things, many of them small, round and metal, which in turn were placed atop wooden stands.

"Okay," he said again. He was holding empty bags in his hand, tossing them to the children. "See those cases?" Some nodded, meaninglessly for he did not care. "Open the tops. They're unlocked. Take what's inside, put it in a bag, and then we can go."

"Why? This doesn't seem useful at all," said the maybe-twelve boy.

The muscles around the eldest's jaw tensed, invisible to the other children in the darkness. "They're coins. Very valuable coins. Some are gold. Now do it."

The boy with a scab on his forehead said, "But what about fingerprints-"

"It doesn't matter!" he snapped. "Like they've got your prints on file. And like they'd be able to tell who it was, of all the people that come here. It's a goddamn museum." When they hesitated, he yelled, "Move it!"

The children dispersed throughout the room, favoring the area nearest the window, where there was the most light. The child did the same, picking a case and opening it. Inside were round things like coins lying on a dark blue cloth. They were cold to the touch when she picked them up, and clattered as she dropped them into the bag she'd been given.

The eldest turned his back a moment, scanning the room. The second biggest boy's eyes were dangerous.

"Huh," he said, turning back a moment. "I'm going to go check on something." He was lying, and the child wondered. "Keep them here."

He walked through the doorway into deeper darkness. A minute passed, a door shut. The second biggest looked around as well, different. His right hand rested on the gun at his waist.

"Okay," he hissed. "All of you, we're getting out of here now." The gun was in his hand and he used it to gesture sharply towards the opposite doorway.

"James," said the third, "James, what are you doing?" His voice was falsely placating.

"Getting out." He looked over the children. His movements were growing tense, jerks and near spasms. What was about to happen, he expected some kind of opposition. What he was doing was something there could be opposition to. Something…it was as if he thought they might realize something. As if he thought that if they understood they would not go along.

"James don't do this," said the third boy. "There isn't any out."

"Shut up!" And his voice was angry and certain and uncertain and something, very much something.

"You can't. You know nobody does. You know the jenny won't let you. Otherwise everyone-"

"Shut up!" he snarled. "I'm not some loyal dog like you."

"The jenny won't help you."

And there was certainty.

The third jerked, and the child's ears were hurt as if struck from the sound, and there was blood on his chest. His expression was confused and pained. He spoke again, but the sound was bubbly and blood came from his mouth. Everything had become quieter. The child then looked to the boy who held the gun, the one left, then to the others.

The others had interesting expressions, the muscles of their faces stretched unusually. One of them began to make crying sounds and the child saw droplets collect on her chin and fall. Momentarily she compared this to the word she knew – crybaby – but there was something different between the situations. The scenes she found fit better was one she did not know words for, other scenes of alone and quiet and muffled sound.

"Be quiet!" yelled the boy with the gun and the child wondered if that was why she did not know the words, if the scene was not to happen in front of others. Perhaps the girl crying had made a mistake. It seemed that way because the boy with the gun hit her and her movements were getting much too fast. "Shut the hell up." He was looking around the group, not paying attention but just watching for movement. "Shut the hell up. You all just do what I say, understand?"

Some of the children whimpered. The girl continued crying. Another one, a younger boy who did not have any visible injuries, started, and the child wondered again what the purpose of crying was. It seemed to make the boy with the gun more upset. And he was breathing in gulps, slower now, and he closed his eyes and the child wondered why. He opened them again. "Kids. Look. Here, they'll kill you. Okay? You were kidnapped and if we go now you can get out of here. If you go back they'll cut you up and feed you to the fearow, do you understand?" He stared at the children. "You guys were kidnapped," he said again. "Your money was stolen, your pokemon were stolen, you were stolen. So we're all going to walk out and go to a jenny, and we'll all be safe."

The child did not want to go to a jenny. She did not like the way they looked at her or the way they acted and especially not the directness of their actions. She did not understand people or jenny but people she could handle.

Most of the children's faces seemed relieved, not comforted exactly but willing. The maybe-twelve boy, who had shaken his head slightly when the older boy talked of kidnapping, he looked angry. All of them looked very something and very uncertain and the child wanted to get away.

"The Officer Jenny, she'll-" said the boy with a bandage on his forehead. He had bunched the bottom of his shirt tightly in one hand. "Even though we're – we're all in uniform and –"

"It's fine!" And the child recognized that this was true, the uniform did not matter. That there was something bad about to happen, something that if the children knew they would refuse.

And he said, "Whatever they told you about jenny, it's not true."

And the child saw the eldest standing in the darkness of the doorway, and she covered her ears before the gunshot.


	9. Minor Changes

She could have asked.

She could have told of the way the eldest had looked at her with a sort of calm surprise. "You didn't even close your eyes," he had said. She could have told of how he had ordered the children to move in a flat voice, how he had walked back in measured steps as if daring the police to find them, how he had walked into the clearing and shot the fearow the dead boys had rode on.

She could have asked. It never occurred to her. But even if it had, she wouldn't have seen it as an option. If she thought she had not understood something she was meant to, something others knew, asking would only call attention to it. One person and another were interchangeable to her. It was not a matter of trusting one over another.

So she could have asked. Instead she waited. Instead she watched.

She saw a boy bigger than her roll his eyes at his task and sit back against the wall, tired and insolent. She saw his blood a moment after, her ears hurting. She saw the sixteen year old's almost blank expression as casually he reholstered the gun and repeated himself.

She saw a girl who started running suddenly and then fell and bled onto the ground, and again her ears hurt and peoples' voices became whispers.

She saw many children who began to cry die.

"You think?" she murmured to her pokemon, conferring behind a group in the shadows. "Runshot. Afterrun don't know. Food though."

Afterrun interesting maybe, offered the houndoom. Attention though.

Maybe runhide they forget, said the sneasel. Beforelike maybe.

"Maybe," she agreed.

Everything contrast-clear. Everything unhidden, said the umbreon. No suddenly no crowd-hiding one no all. Everything stark contrast different. Everything divided.

The child agreed. All of the people stood apart, were dangerous in seen ways, exposed ways. Were dangerous in ways that didn't choose her.

"Not together," she whispered.

So she stayed.

-

She might have passed some test. Perhaps not being dead was passing. At any rate, things changed.

It seemed like they were taking things important, or thought they were at least, because she could hear that they believed it truly. She thought this might be better, because there was less running and being shot. She wasn't sure though.

Things happened much the same each time. A group would assemble. One had a map they called a blueprint. It was not blue. The child saw several children hit for mentioning this, so she did not. The older ones touched a finger to various points or made marks in pencil while talking. These were meant to be notable things, such as alarms. Often but not always she would be told around this point that if she set off an alarm she'd regret it and go down stairs, as if saying it as two words lent it greater power as a threat. She tried to look attentive when they told her this so they wouldn't hit her.

They would go someplace. The building was always large and in good repair but beyond that varied widely, and it would generally be entered as discussed. She would trail along with the group, watching them open windows and doors, pick locks, cut and connect wires, lose their tempers and smash something.

When they reached the goal, which was sometimes but not always the box called safe, they would take things of value. She would be given some or much to carry. Often they laughed then because safe was safe, and patted her on the head. "You're good and quiet," they said. "You stay like that and we won't have to shoot you." This was of course not true.

-

Once something was apparently different. This was stated flatly by the boy who appeared in charge, but was more importantly in the edgy look the three oldest had.

The child was currently crouched in one corner of the truck, the noise and vibration making her thoughts turn around in the narrow considerations of the best escape. Across from her, a boy well larger and perhaps a year younger than her was rubbing gingerly at his cheek, which was already showing the faint beginnings of a bruise. He'd mentioned the blueprint's color.

Another child, outwardly similar in behavior, might have watched this with a feeling of smugness.

The child was not given to comparing herself to others. She took from the scene only that the eldest boy was strong enough to hurt her.

The eldest was in the front, driving. The other older boy was calmer, conciliatory. "What's your name?" he asked the small boy.

"Jacob," was the response, sullen.

"You do this before?"

The nod was more enthusiastic. "Twice." He sounded – proud. The child was still having trouble understanding that. He looked suddenly to her, his expression a mixture of irritation and smugness. "Bet that's more'in you."

The child didn't answer. He wasn't strong enough to hurt her.

"Well, this is going to be a – a little different," the older boy said. Beside him, the girl snorted derisively. "Pretty different," he amended smoothly, the tone of his voice clear he was still not telling them the truth. "It's going to be really important that you do as you're told, without hesitation."

"I know!" said the small boy. "You oughta tell her, she's the one who doesn't know anything." His left hand was still on the bruise on his cheek; he was desperate to establish himself as the better one, the adult one.

"She's listening, I'm sure." He looked to her. "Right?"

She made eye contact obligingly and nodded slightly, less than one of them would have but enough that they would accept it as such. She wanted him to say what was different, what was important, but she didn't ask.

The small boy, who had not learned from being hit the first time, did. "So what's so different, anyway?" The edges of the older boy's mouth tightened.

"You steal from houses?" said the girl, speaking up finally with a glance at the older boy beside her.

The small boy, after a moment's betraying hesitation, nodded. He hadn't.

"This is kinda like that. Only the people aren't gone."

From the younger boy's expression, this was a important difference. The child wondered why. It occurred to her they were perhaps dangerous, but that did not seem like it was it. At any rate, she and the small boy would not be expected to fight for the older ones. They were there for carrying and being hit.

"What are – we going to do?" he asked.

"You aren't going to do anything," the girl said somewhat snappishly. "You're just here to be a pack mule."

The older boy better addressed the question. "We're going after a thief, actually, a former employee, a guy who took off with some really important stuff." Then he said something the child couldn't understand. "A traitor, basically, a backstabber who repaid Team Rocket's money and help by trying to rip us off, you know?"

And the small boy seemed to understand this. The words had resonated somehow. "Yeah," he said, face almost glowing with determination. With belief. "He deserves it, a traitor."

The child said nothing at this and the small boy looked to her again. She had the idea she should perhaps say something. But the exchange that had taken place was baffling, and the child had a deep sense that it was a bad idea to mimic blindly. She made no attempt to repeat the small boy's words, and in a moment he demanded, "Well? You think he should get away with it?"

"I think she's just mute," the girl remarked, and suddenly the child's attention was redirected from the motion of the floor, the sound of tires on ground, the rumbling of an engine, the blocked door. "Sara said there was a kid in her group last week that didn't talk. Little black-haired girl who just did what everyone said. That was you, right."

"I can talk," the child said in a clear voice. "They didn't ask me anything."

"The sort who speaks when spoken to?" The girl looked deliberately to the small boy. "Nice. Not enough of those around."

-

The house they reached was conveniently located. The area was opulent, the houses a bit shy of mansions. They stood well apart from each other. A thick wall of pines and hedges separated the intended house from its neighbors.

The approach went fine. There was no one around, and if a few other windows were lit, they were only gold pinpricks through the pines.

The entering went fine. There was the figure of an adult behind one lit window on the upper story, obscured by curtains. There was a warning mark on the windows indicating an alarm system. There was another window, open, with a trellis for some flowering thornless plant reaching up to it. The eldest looked to the girl and rolled his eyes, muttering, "What an idiot." He climbed up and simply let his weight rest against the screen a second to tear it off, so that he tumbled neatly into the room onto dull white carpet, and the others followed.

Then a little boy opened the door and started screaming, and it was abruptly not fine, but rather very, very bad. The eldest had barely clapped his hand over the toddler's mouth when the mother entered.

She screamed too. The other two older ones tried to grab her. The woman tried to not be grabbed, and the girl hit her hard over the head with the butt of a gun. The child was somewhat happy about this, because she liked when they didn't shoot. It was noisy.

"Shit shit shit!" the eldest was saying frantically, and the toddler wailed. It seemed they had things well enough in hand and the child really didn't care. She ignored all of them and headed out, pushing the door closed to muffle the sound a bit. She could hear something else she thought might be important. Footsteps, below.

Before her was a bronze railing, and a clear drop to the lower floor, with the door a little way further. The stairs were perhaps a dozen feet to left. There was no one else to watch her. She grabbed onto the railing and jumped over, landing in front of the man holding a briefcase.

She looked at him. "Stay there," she told him.

He didn't do what she said. Instead he tried to move past her. She hit his leg at the knee and there was a breaking sound. Then he stayed where he was, like she'd told him.

The sounds above still didn't seem important. The man was making noise as well, but with a meaningless rhythm to it. Her attention settled on the briefcase he'd been holding. It had not been properly closed and had opened when he dropped it. She stepped over him to look at the paper that spilled out.

After a few seconds, the sound the man was making changed and she began to pay attention.

"Why are you doing this?"

"I was told to," she said, setting the papers she'd picked up back on the ground. She looked to him. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, half mimicking the tone of his question.

"God," he said, but the tone of his voice had changed to the meaningless pattern and she stopped paying attention. Instead she walked over the pink marble floor to the carpeted stairs and climbed silently back up to the room the group was in.

One of the boys came out before she reached it. From the distracted glance he gave her, she guessed he hadn't noticed she had left.

"He's downstairs," she said.

"Huh?"

"The one you wanted." She pointed over the railing.

"God you're calm," he said a similar meaningless way to the man. Then, "He didn't notice?"

"He was trying to leave before. But I saw him." The child had heard him first, but she knew saw was the way of referring to any kind of noticing.

The boy looked over the railing. "Huh," he said again. He was not one to complain about good fortune.

"Jesus," come the girl's voice from inside the room. "What are we supposed to do now?"

"Just a sec, Jen," he called back. He looked over the railing again, satisfying himself that the man would not be leaving, then headed back inside. The child followed.

Inside the woman and toddler had been tied and gagged, pointlessly in the woman's case. There was blood around where her head lay, and she was not awake.

"The target's down on the first floor," the eldest boy said. "He's incapacitated, we can deal with this."

"How do we deal with this?" demanded the other boy a bit shrilly. "There wasn't supposed to be anyone else here!"

"Guess intel got it wrong. They came back from vacation early or something," the eldest said, attempting to brush it off. It was clear he didn't even think it possible.

"Bull," snapped the girl. "They wouldn't wait 'til these guys were out to go after him. Those bastards just figured we might balk, so they lied to us. Goddammit!" she snarled. She kicked the bureau next to her hard enough to send a cascade of tiny plastic toys to the carpet, the lamp nearly following. "Didn't stop to think it'd screw the whole thing up if we didn't know!"

"It's done now," said the eldest, who seemed a lot calmer now that everything had happened.

"We leave them, then?"

The child pointed. "She stopped breathing."

The girl swore, flipping open a knife and cutting off the gag in a quick motion, leaving a red line down the woman's cheek. She pulled the body upright in a jerk and the woman breathed in suddenly, a rough, irregular gasp.

After a long moment, the eldest said finally, "We don't have orders to take anyone else." He was looking at the toddler. "It'd be a waste of resources to bring them back." There was a sort of relief in his voice. "Well, come on." The others started out and he turned and snapped, "Move it!"

The small boy jumped. He edged around the two bodies and ran to catch up with the others.

The group filed down to the first floor. The man had crawled a foot or so since she'd seen him last, but seemed to have given up.

"Huh," said the eldest again. He kicked the briefcase absently. "That all of it?"

The man didn't answer.

"Hey!" He bent down and grabbed the man just under the chin. "Is – that – all – of – it!"

"Y-yes," the man said.

"There's more," the child said. She was curious.

"You think you can lie to me, asshole!"

"She doesn't know – why would she know –" the man tried to reason.

"Where is it!" The eldest wrenched the man up by the throat.

"In – it's in the other room. Behind me."

"Show us," the eldest demanded, grabbing one arm and trying to pull the man to his feet.

Automatically the man tried to stand. He let out a muffled scream as his injured leg crumpled under the weight.

"Worthless!" the eldest boy snarled, the word more of an oath than his earlier swears. The other boy went over to grab the man's other side, and between them they held him upright and dragged him toward the room he'd indicated.

"How'd you know?" the girl asked, sounding mildly curious. "Just a guess?"

The child pointed to the papers the girl was gathering. "Those are numbered on the corner. A lot of numbers are missing."

The girl closed the briefcase. "You are good," she said, patting the child absently on the head.

This time the small boy did not seem to notice. He was staring blankly, swallowing every few seconds. "Hey!" the girl shouted, and he jerked, startled, to stare at her. "Stop that. Take this and don't throw up on it." She shoved the briefcase into his hands. "Now come on, kiddies, there's probably more to carry in there." She headed after the boys.

In the room was a file cabinet with an open drawer and more paper on the table, the stack messy as if someone had dropped it carelessly. The eldest was sitting casually in the chair next to it.

"That's all of it?" he asked, his voice almost lazy.

"Yes," the man said. He was lying on the floor, the other boy standing near. Then, "Are they – okay?"

The older boy kicked him in the ribs, throwing his full weight into it. "What the hell do you care! This is all because of you!" The force knocked him back into the legs of the table, and he lay there gasping. "You were just trying to take off, so don't act like you care about your wife now!"

"She's…my sister," he said, still gasping. "My sister and nephew."

He probably shouldn't have spoken, because the older boy kicked him again. "Great!" he screamed. "That makes it so damn much better!"

"Leave him alone now, you're going to kill him," said the eldest, but there was anger in his voice as well. "And it's worse for him if we bring him back alive." The other boy nodded, slightly reluctant and slightly relieved.

The girl swept the papers into a box and the child stepped forward to take it. It was heavy and she leaned backward a bit to balance. "You got it?" The child nodded. "Alright then guys, let's get out of here."

The eldest nodded. "We're done here." He pushed himself off the chair and grabbed one arm of the man. He appeared unconscious. The girl took the other, and they started dragging the body toward the front door. The child followed and, after a shove and a yelp, so did the small boy, with the older boy walking behind.

The older boy drifted further behind as they went outside, his walk gaining a hesitancy that hinted he was considering some action. It didn't seem threatening to the child, so she only paid partial attention and made no attempt to stop it.

When the eldest boy and the girl had almost reached the truck, he bent and picked up a rock from the ground, then flung it through one of the windows. An alarm blared.

The eldest boy let go, the girl letting out a soft grunt as she took the weight, and punched the older boy in the face, hard enough he doubled over. "What the hell did you do!"

He didn't answer.

"In! Now!" snapped the eldest. The child set the box inside. The girl slung the body inside. They climbed inside and closed the doors, and then they left.

So it wasn't really different after all, even though they'd said it would be.

-

One daybreak shortly after, rather than being pushed along one set of hallways to the room she'd started out at, she was upon returning grabbed and pulled down a different set of hallways, deposited by a different door, and pushed into a different room.

Girls looked at her who were for the most part interchangeable with the ones before. They were fewer, which was good, and the room they were in was smaller, which was not.

"So you're the replacement?" said the one who was second biggest in a way that was only half question.

Change was unsafe. She liked best to be able to enter and exit on her own terms, to observe from a distance and always have a way out if anything went awry. But change was also new which was like safe somehow. The two feelings annulled so that it was neither good nor bad. So that it was nothing.

The girls talked to her. They had a jaded kind of half knowledge, and under their voices they said they knew they did not know, but only told themselves they did.

They told her that the way things worked was for certain kinds of things, certain kinds of thefts, there were also certain groups. This way no one would know about several kinds of things, like a spy.

The last part was so false it hummed painfully behind the child's ears, but she did not know what the truth of it was. She thought of digging her fingers into the girl's neck so that the blood would run down her arms. She nodded placidly.

And it wasn't really dangerous.

(But she wasn't replacing someone live.)

And it was nothing that really mattered.

(But this wasn't true.)

And that was all.


	10. Name

The child didn't answer.

"You're just going to ignore me? They already know, don't think your being quiet is going to protect you or something." The girl's expression was scornful, her voice threatening.

The child didn't answer.

"Leave her alone," said one of the others lazily, as much for quiet as anything.

"Come on, it's annoying. What should I say, hey annoying kid?" The girl looked back to the speaker, the irritation in her movements blurring into boredom. "It's annoying."

"You're annoying," said a third, sounding harmless. She didn't look up.

But the second girl's attention had been attracted. "Hm," she said, hopping off the upper bed she'd been lounging on and sauntering over. "We can nickname her then!" She was watching the child for a reaction. The child did not give one. She wasn't sure what they wanted, even if she could see one was expected.

"You can't give her a _nick_name because she doesn't have a _name_," the first girl said, irritation bleeding back into her voice.

"Sure you can," the girl said. Her voice was cheerful, welcoming a distraction. "Like a pokemon. She can be our group's pet!" The child was not actually that much younger, but they didn't understand that. "She's tiny enough." The girls were talking between themselves, not paying attention to her.

"Okay, fine. What's her name then, Spot?"

"Hm," the second girl said, leaning back with her forefinger on her chin in a exaggerated thinking posture, assumed somewhat unconsciously. "Ice," she decided.

"For the ignoring us, or that vacant expression? Nicer than I'd be." The first girl reached out and poked the child on the shoulder. The child looked at her finger.

"Well – yeah. But it's not exactly vacant." She stared at the child's face unselfconsciously. The child stared back. "I had a pet meowth, you know. Back when I was a kid?" The girl was perhaps fourteen. "It looked like that. He'd stare at you like you weren't there. But you know, he'd bolt if a stranger showed up." She turned away, looking to her friend casually.

The other girl leaned forward to stare at the child's face. "So you're saying, Ice?"

"Well, my meowth was Snow."


	11. Oblivious

"That's Ice," said the girl. She sounded proud of herself.

The boy wasn't impressed. "Fine." They were about the same height but he was probably a year older. That may have had something to do with his bad mood. "That wasn't what I asked. I said why was she _here_?"

"You're mean. Isn't she cute?"

"Still not answering my question..."

The girl giggled. "You'll see."

"God. Girls."

"So what are we doing anyway?" she asked. "You know, so tell us."

"Retrieval."

"Um..." The girl's voice was uncertain, was something. "You mean, like..." She trailed off.

"God," he said in the same tone of voice, rolling his eyes. "We're just stealing some prototype."

"Oh, yeah, okay," she said.

The child thought something of significance had been mentioned, but what, exactly, that had been she didn't know.

-

"Shit!" the boy hissed, slamming the palm of his hand into the wall by the doorframe.

"What? What's wrong?"

"It's locked."

"It's okay. Doesn't mean anything happened, someone could always come along and fix an unlocked door you-"

"I know that!" he snapped, although it was obvious that this was part of it, as it was obvious the girl did not fully believe what she said. They both understood; one was trying to placate the other. "But that doesn't change the fact we can't get in."

"Well, there's an open window there." She pointed to a window on the second story. It was slightly ajar, perhaps open, perhaps not.

"Might be, but we can't get up there."

The girl grinned. "Told you." She turned to the child. "Ice, go up there and come back to open the door for us."

The girl barely knew what she was asking – this was the sort of thing that a kid could look at as possibly doable, but taking so much effort it went untried. She knew only that she could ask the child to do things, and the child would, and she did not properly understand the magnitude of what she asked. So it should be understood: she thought it possible. She thought the child obedient and perhaps somewhat skilled, nothing more.

And obediently the child considered. Then she picked one of the pokeballs from her pocket and opened it. The sneasel appeared and she pointed upward even as it formed, so that the dark type moved immediately, before either of the others could get a good look.

The sneasel perched on the ledge, the claws on one paw digging lightly into the brick for purchase, and pushed lightly on the window. It pivoted.

The boy said something irritable that the child ignored as meaningless. She jumped and grabbed for the edge of the first-story windowsill, then pulled herself up. She stood carefully on the ledge, balancing, then jumped again, reaching the second windowsill.

Think this idea? asked the sneasel quietly as the child pulled at the top of the window to open it further, holding tightly to keep her balance. The windowpane was attached at the middle so that it rotated rather than moving up and down. As she leaned backward, it pivoted until it was horizontal, the furthest it would go. The sneasel slid through the opening by the bottom, then the child. They landed on carpet.

"It seems okay," the child answered. "Not like sending in front for traps. Just be of use." She considered the surroundings.

The sneasel's ear feather twitched in acknowledgment. This is? she asked, looking around as well.

The room was an office of a sort. There was a desk, a computer, assorted papers. The computer had been left on, and it hummed unpleasantly.

"It wasn't explained. Something to take here. Said retrieval, said steal. Don't know whose. The boy thinks it's already Rocket's."

The sneasel was amused by this like the child. Not the first time decided something had already belonged to them, she agreed. Wonder why. Wonder which.

"Maybe we'll find out," the child whispered in response to the second as the two headed for the door. She said the we only for emphasis, that they might while the others didn't. Outside was more carpeting, a dark but faded blue. The walls looked fuzzy, like they were covered in felt. The child touched it and understood. Cushion bumps.

The sneasel asked, Hurry? Or look?

"The girl thinks I'm her pet. So between." The child oriented herself, figuring out where the door lay. She had to go left, but first she needed to find the way down. She started walking down the hall, looking into the rooms. They didn't see anything interesting.

A dozen yards past where the door to outside was, they came to a staircase. The child pushed the door open and started down. The stairs were carpeted too.

The child found the door she'd been told. It was locked and the child could see the keyhole from this side. There was no other lock. She tried turning the knob and as expected, it remained locked.

She turned to the sneasel, and in a moment that section of the door was cut away. The child pushed the door open and backed up smoothly to avoid the boy's slap.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he shouted.

"It needed a key to be unlocked," she explained. "I didn't have a key. You wanted me to open the door."

"Hey, stop it," said the girl. "See, she is good. It's not her fault things aren't going like intended."

The boy glared at her a moment, and they walked in. The girl patted the child on the head.

"Why does a kid have pokemon?" said the boy.

"Hey, it's no big deal. Lots of kids do."

"Rattata," he said, staring at the sneasel, and the child recognized things were heading in a bad direction. "That's not one. What is that?"

"This is Slice," the child said, the pitch of her voice the same as _hide now_. The sneasel hopped back to stand behind her, peeking from behind one leg, and the child moved backward slightly herself.

And, "Don't worry," the girl said then of course. "He's not going to do anything."

"Whatever," the boy replied, of course.

So the first challenge was resolved.

The boy began doing the sort of counting they did by reciting a list of numbers. They passed five doors, came to a cross in the hallway, turned left. The boy restarted his list. They passed three more doors. At the fourth, he paused and without breathing a moment he reached out to grab the knob.

It twisted easily and the door opened. He resumed breathing.

The room was large, with a number of machines. Some appeared complete, others variously less so. The boy went to one. "This is it, then," he said, picking up a blocky steel thing. He flipped it over in his hands, his movements slow as if it were heavy, than gave it to the girl. "Thirty-one be," he said to himself, picking through a metal cabinet. "Got it." He pulled out a fat file with 31B written on the tab. "Okay, kid, be useful and carry something."

The child took it, leaning back slightly for balance.

"So what is this, anyway?" asked the girl, looking at the metal she was holding.

"That's not the sort of thing to be told to someone low-rank."

The girl rolled her eyes. "Yeah. So what do you think it is?"

"Some sort of broadcaster or something. Don't know what exactly." He shrugged. "Well, reading the documentary stuff on the way back should clear it up."


	12. Three

"That's ridiculous," dismisses one of the older girls, waving a hand with a livid healing cut on the back. "Mind control waves? Did you really think anyone would believe that?"

"It's not mind control waves! It's radio waves and they just make pokemon go insane."

Another girl with a bruise under her jaw says, "Right. Mind control waves, that's ridiculous, but driving pokemon nuts by radio! Totally believable."

"It's true!" the first girl, who had been there, says. "Ice, tell them he said that."

For a moment, all of the girls in the room turn to look at the child. "Yes," offers the child, and they turned back to the discussion. The child found that the best way to be ignored was to give people what they wanted before she could be noticed behind it.

"There, see?" says the first girl. "I'm not making it up."

"She's just saying it because you told her to," says one of the others, ignoring the child again.

"No she isn't! Ice, tell them you're not just saying that because I told you to," protests the first girl.

"I'm not just saying that because you told me to," the child repeats obediently.

"Oh, that's convincing," says one of the younger girls.

But then, "Why are you going along with this?" says another one, looking to the child, and it suddenly enters into the child's interest to resolve the discussion. "Did she tell you this stuff was true before you guys got here? You shouldn't say something's true if you didn't hear it yourself, you know."

"She did so! We were both there and he really did say that!"

"Right. So, kiddy, what _did_ he say?"

"He said," the child begins, and then, with the same words, and the same voice, she repeats what she'd heard.

Looking at their expressions it occurs to her that perhaps it would have been better to remain silent. She might have filed this away as a mistake had she been capable of conceiving of such.

"How'd you do that?" demands the girl with the cut on her hand. The child does not know how this was to be answered, but luckily the girl does not seem to care, because she continues, "Cool. Why didn't you just do that to start?"

"Where'd you learn that," says another in a flat voice with something the child can't quite recognize at the edges, as if the other girl hadn't even spoke.

The child also does not know how this is to be answered, but sees that not answering would not be a good choice either. "On my own," she says, trying to sound as small and harmless as she can.

"When?"

"When he was talking-" The girl moves sharply as if to hit her, and the child recoils the way she's seen people do. As she's seen people do, the rest of the group shifts, unhappy with the idea.

And the girl does not hit her, but says, "When did you learn how to do that?" her voice filled with hard anger and still the something at the edges.

"Janet, what's the big-"

"When!" she snaps.

"Before," the child says. "A lot of time before." She does not remember a time she could not do it.

"Before you came here?" the girl says with the tension starting to fade, and it is obvious what the right answer is.

"Uh-huh." She is confused and her voice is confused.

And the threatening of the girl disappears, and when one of the others asks, voice sharp from the aftermath of tension, "What the hell was that about?" she just says, "You can't be too careful," and then, "Nevermind."

-

But it's not over. Because she spoke and now others spoke and asked her to do it again, to mimic the boy's voice or theirs. She refuses, shaking her head in desperate emphasis and pulling back from them, but they know, and that's what matters.

She's done something they'll remember. Something that they think wasn't, quite, impossible for the child she is pretending to be, but close enough.

She wants to fix it. She doesn't know how.

She thinks to kill them. She doesn't know how.

So she shakes her head and pulls back and waits.

-

It's lucky that what she did, what they can't do, they don't think about it for too long. Just a novelty. She doesn't do it again, and eventually they stop badgering.

Days pass, and she thinks they're forgetting. Might be. She doesn't understand their forgetting even though she's familiar enough with it, and so she doesn't feel safe relying on it.

But she doesn't feel safe ever, so this is nothing new.

It doesn't matter, since there isn't anything she can do about it. There isn't anything she knows she can do about it. If there's a distinction there, it's lost on her.

No one else asks her to speak differently, so she thinks they didn't bother to tell others. But they so easily could, she knows, because she knows they speak for no reason, words and secrets spilling out thoughtlessly in boredom.

And it doesn't matter.

Two of them die, which makes her feel better. A third one is in the same group as she is and gets killed partially because of her (the child was still working out guilt and blame and involvement and choice - if you drag someone to the cliff edge and throw them off it's your fault. If they fall off on their own it's theirs. If you're standing there and you don't stop them it's not yours? If they're standing there and making it easier to push them off it's yours? Because if they'd been more careful you'd never have been able to drag them to the cliff in the first place and how is that different really than not being careful enough to avoid slipping off the edge when it's only you and you're obviously not going to help.) That also makes her feel better. The others of the group act differently with each death. They have more things to think about that aren't her or what she did.

She thinks it would be better if they were all dead. She knows she can't do that. She thinks she could, maybe. Almost.

Not yet. Someday. (Next time?)

-

There isn't any reason she knows, but one day she's shoved into a new room with different girls, some of who are not exactly new because she's seen them before.

They pay more attention to her. She finds new ways to talk less.

It doesn't help.

-

She's learning again, because she has to learn.

The child had understood that simply being unnoticed didn't work forever. At some point, one or another would look through a group one by one and they'd realize they hadn't paid attention to her, and then she would jump into sight. They'd notice. They'd make others notice. They'd speak and want her to speak. And sooner or later she'd speak, or act, and it'd be wrong and they'd know. She knew all this.

The child just hadn't learned what to do next. She'd always just left before it could be a problem.

And she's stuck there now.

The other groups had been larger and looser. Being unnoticed hadn't been completely possible, but it had worked almost, close enough for the moment, and so she had kept doing it rather than something new. People had been willing to not pay attention to her. This one is smaller. From the way they talk and move and look, they have been together longer. They are not a collection who lie to her in introduction as if replacements were not commonplace. Being nobody makes them upset, makes them try harder to get something from her. Makes them dangerous in potential. They show their teeth like they're friendly, and their eyes catch on her face and search for the flaws.

She learns several things, because she is, after all, good at learning.

One, she is not acting enough like the child she has to be for them to not kill her. Two, the less she acts, the more people would remember the few scraps of behavior she had, the things she had no choice in. Three, a lack of personality is a significant and remarkable personality trait.

So:

She knows how kids are supposed to act. She knows how kids do act. She knows how people want kids to act.

_Kids are supposed to be curious._

"Why?" she asks, putting all of her effort into sounding placatory and nice and not-irritating. It almost isn't enough, even still, but although he tenses like he is annoyed, he doesn't move to hit her.

"It's Silph's new model," he tells her, which is what it said on the box before the box was smoking and half melted. "Which means it goes off if a wire is cut. It doesn't if there's a power surge."

_Kids get tired._

"Why're you setting it down?" the girl asks while she picks a lock.

"It was heavy," the child says.

One of the others reaches over to pick it up with one hand. It doesn't budge, and the only sign she is actually trying is the shift in her weight a second, before she grabs it in both hands and lifts for real. "Jesus. Sorry. Why didn't you say something?"

_However, being a kid can be an inconvenience._

So she doesn't say anything when the boy who is only three inches taller than her is shot, three times, and the other boy, who is almost a foot taller and supposed to be in charge, is staring at her for motion, for any sign she will move or speak or cry or scream with eyes that are wide, the pupils large and dilated to be almost mirrors of her own.

She stands there until the hands aiming the gun at her start shaking, until they steady again, until he takes several gasping breaths and can put the gun away.

So:

They are happy to make up reasons and stories of her, to fill in cracks and flaws in the thing she is pretending to be, and they will keep believing as long as she does not contradict those. They will persist, no matter what she does, in remembering her actions, so those must hide in plain sight rather than going unseen. And they will believe like guileless children in whatever actions she does take.

_Encourage the wrong guesses._

"Why do you keep your larvitar out? It's not exactly cuddly."

"Sam-" says another girl in the tone of voice for small things that, all the same, shouldn't be mentioned.

And the first girl does know what she thinks the answer is, because she says, "Are you really that scared of us, that you need a live teddy bear or you can't sleep at night?"

The child could say that she does not sleep in any place with an 'us' without another set of eyes watching to wake her up if something happens. The child could say she does not sleep many of the nights anyway. The child could say that she is not scared. The child could say she does not understand being scared. The child could say that it has nothing to do with protection because she is capable of killing the girl. The child could say it has everything to do with protection and being able to sleep in a room full of things that are and always will be considered enemies in her mind.

Instead the child hugs the larvitar to her chest and doesn't answer with her voice. She keeps him out more.

_If they persist in trying to figure you out, give them what they want like a wrapped toy, so that they can play with it instead._

In the first days, they watch her for small things, catching on the faint few hints of behavior – for the way she tries to keep distance between them and her, and sticks to corners and walls where no one can get behind her, for the way she steps away from them when they try to touch her if she can, and ignores it if she can't.

She tries first to minimize it further, to act less, but the less she does the more they magnify the small bits that remain. And it means having to act in ways she hates, to stand within reach or closer, to ignore the presence of enemies at her back.Worst, what is left for them to see and remember is what is most essential, least avoidable, where she will not be able to find alternatives when it becomes predictable. When she will most need it.

She pulls up memories of others, finds times when other children, who were truly what she is pretending, acted in ways that matched what she wanted to do, or close enough. She pulls that over her actions.

The child becomes skittish. She comes closer of her own accord, as if willingly, but startles if anyone moves toward her, and recoils when they try to touch her. She flinches at raised hands, eye contact, loud voices. It's the contact she hates most, the threat of being grabbed, held, when she needs to escape. Once they're given a reason they can understand, they accept this, and without further curiosity.

_And if they're going to trap you, trap them._

For a time, she freezes around fire pokemon. She counts off seconds based on how large, how active, the presence of open flame or large teeth, before she moves, edging away, shifting her weight uneasily in movements close to nervous fidgets. She moves behind others when it's an option, and jumps back if they face her or spit out flames. She watches the pokemon and watches the others watch her and knows how to make it obvious or background, to be remembered if it's mentioned. Obvious she does most with one group, one man, who she was involved with the death of the woman who he was with sometimes and who looks at her in a way she pegs as calculating.

It pays off when one of the groups splits up, into, he makes sure, pairs, picking her to go with him.

She kicks the ninetales in the head when it's barely solidified and jumps him while his expression is still uncomprehending. She digs her nails into his shoulders for purchase and tears out his throat with her teeth, and she rolls to her feet and grasps for the pokeball in time to recall the ninetales before it comes to its senses.

She washes the blood off before going back to the group. They don't ask for details about the death or even how it happened.

She drops seconds slowly over the next few weeks until she hits zero. Then she discards it entirely.

She didn't even understand what it was she was copying.

So:

She had to be a person, which means being a collection of mundane things that are noticeable in that they exist, but not in that they are of any interest.

_Disguise attention with something harmless_.

She develops an obsession with architecture. She memorizes floor plans and the names of styles, learns the words for different parts and the materials they're made of as well as the tools used to do the job. She learns the dates things begin and the more fuzzy timeline for when they fade, and the difference between original and the resurgence thirty years later.

In her thoughts she pins all these things in place like a framework.

She doesn't slip off from the groups to stare at bricks, because if she did it as herself she'd be moving unnoticed, and if she lets them just notice it would be easy to mistake for bolting. Instead she moves sideways in places with long walls where there's nowhere to run, telegraphs her motions as distracted, deliberately moving as if she has no idea it could be taken as trying to escape and exaggerated enough they see not only her but her direction. She stares at cracks in the bricks and flaws in the marble and the pattern of arches. She touches stone mortar and unravels the whirls of wooden walls and floors.

In her mind she guesses at structural integrity and whether or not she could break through the wall. She learns how to tell the difference between where the ceiling will collapse and where it probably won't, and then she puts it into the framework and sees what can be predicted just by the obvious things she doesn't care about on her own, what she could learn when people talk of what little things they see elsewhere.

She doesn't explain her actions. For most people, it's enough that she's doing something. She looks interested, which justifies her action, and in something they don't care about, which prevents them from asking her much.

To the few people who ask, she says she's interested in buildings.

"You mean like architecture styles?" he says, having probably heard someone else say this and explain one concept or another. "What's this one?"

"Gothic," she says. It's revival neo-Gothic mixed with bits of others, but her hand is on the sharp hardness of the black metal fence around the not-veranda-not-deck, and the house is expansive like a heavy dress, lace yellow with age and the thread beginning to decay.

"Goth?" he says, his eyes going to the white paint on the walls.

"Gothic like Victorian," she explains, and she moves her hand on the top of the elaborate whirls of the fence to attract his attention, and says, "They made the cast iron as elaborate as lace."

_Fill in empty spaces with noise._

She runs her hand along the stone wall where it's too dark for them to see her fingers clearly. She knows they don't like her quiet or forgetting her, so she hums softly, a short repeated tune that's indistinct enough to not annoy by repetition, a way of saying **I am here**.

"Having fun?" one of them asks.

_Occupy time with apparent interests._

The child worked out how long it takes someone to read a page, and how short it takes for someone to realize you're not, in fact, reading. There's a gap between the two and when she counts between turning pages, it's skirting the edge of the second but with enough time no one would actually notice.

She is reading. She looks at a page. Then she processes the letters into words and sentences and paragraphs.

Then she thinks about it, and then other things, until she counts up high enough to turn the page. She watches the others in the sides of her vision, the thing they talk about doing sometimes but can't really. She thinks she could say she was doing this and they would not understand it was true. She thinks she should not say she is doing this because she can and they can't.

She's working her way through the books in the room, without preference. They're a mixture of training books and novels, and the main point is really just looking like she's doing something.

It makes the others feel happy that she isn't sitting quietly and staring at nothing.


	13. Asking the Dead

The walls and ceiling of the corridor had caved in, and in two directions they were trapped, left in a small pocket.

The child had wiggled loose without much trouble. The other one, a boy, had been further into the pocket area but had gotten hit in the chest with a piece of rubble. He'd managed to pull himself into a sitting position, but there was blood in his mouth and the child could hear, faintly, the irregular beat of his heart, skipping every few minutes.

The child's displayed behavior was not innate. It was a collection of deliberate actions she'd assembled over time. It was habit of a sort, but it was not automatic or ingrained.

The boy was dying. No one else would get there for a while, and if they did, the child had plenty of time to kill the boy without suspicion. It didn't matter what he saw or heard.

Most of the act remained – it was too complex to shrug on and off, even for her. Still, even dying, the boy's eyes widened slightly and his expression was surprised.

"How did you come to be here?" the child said.

"H-here?" the boy repeated.

The child touched the R on her chest. "Doing what they say. Wanting to do what they say. You started as-?"

"They just – picked me up. I was a trainer." The boy coughed suddenly. He grimaced as if it were painful, and covered his mouth with his hand. When he pulled his hand away, there was red. He stared at it a moment. "Am I-"

"So why do you want to do what they say?"

"Same reason as you," he said dimly. "Right?"

She shook her head for him. He stared at her, looking unhurriedly puzzled.

"Why do you want to do what they say?" she insisted.

"It's...important. What they're doing is important. So I want to help because it's important. Show them I'm notta kid. You know." His voice perked slightly, the ebbed, trailing off.

"You didn't join," she said.

He stared at her, eyes blank, faintly perplexed. "Yeah. I...right. Did you?"

"So why do you want to help?"

"Because it's...Important and..." he explained, his voice peaking weakly and dipping like the waves of a placid lake. Overlaid on the sound was the beating and skipping of his heart. Listening to the two echo and not echo was like a song.

"Why do you care what they think?"

From his expression he was struggling to understand what she'd said. She waited patiently. "Because they're..." he started, then trailed off as he hit the next part. "You're s'posed to, it's – important." His head was listing to the side. The child cocked her head to match the slant. "Why are you – asking me all of...this?" Y'sem really...different. Thought you were younger." His eyes tried to focus on her. He coughed. This time his hands stayed by his sides.

There was no point in talking to the dead. The child nestled in the stones and ignored the soft voice fighting for urgency that slowly faded.


	14. Chance

"Aren't you lucky?" said the girl, sounding almost wondering, when she saw her sitting unharmed among the rocks.

The tunnel was warm, and the child was in no hurry. She'd been barely hurt and her breathing was shallow and easy. If she'd thought of it, she'd have understood that eventually the oxygen would begin to run out, even for her. But that was eventually, farther than the child usually thought.

So she cared little that the machoke had cleared things, or that the girl had given the order, and made no effort to help.

She looked down the cleared tunnel instead. For a good distance it had caved in completely, enough to crush her if she'd been there.

"When did he..." the girl started.

"He died about an hour ago," the child said, because she'd fallen asleep before he'd finished dying and so didn't know the exact time.

"God I don't know," the girl was saying. She was looking at the body. If the child had ever been given to assuming they acted anything like she did, the child would have told her that it was a body, not a boy, and there was no need to watch it because it wouldn't do anything. The child was not, and kept quiet. "I don't know. Do we...just leave him?"

The girl was worn down, the question barely a question. She looked to the child again. "You don't know," she said to no one. "You don't know how lucky you are."

Lucky.

-

"You're lucky," says the girl, "to like reading."

She's sitting with her legs danging over the edge of the lower leg, another book open on her lap, watching all of them around her. There's a feeling like someone touching her between her shoulders and the idea of pain, and the same on the back of her legs. It's faint but nagging. She wants to move, back up until she's pressed against the wall. And with that comes another feeling, of being cornered and trapped, and she wants there not to be a wall at all, nothing blocking or confining her.

Instead she's sitting pretending to read. There's a sense this is worse than what it could be. It is tolerable and she is alive and she understands there are worse things, so many she trips over them trying to find better and failing.

There's something shimmering beyond the edges of her eyes again and she's pretending not to see it, while she pretends to look at what's before her and watches the world in what's left between them, to be ready for when it tries to kill her again.

"I never thought of it like that," she says to the girl politely.

Because she imagines in her mind killing them. Her thoughts move about like a hunted thing, racing along one path (claws into shoulder of the nearest one to brace then digging her other hand into the stomach pushing off and kicking) and then doubling back, trying to find the way through.

She imagines ripping them with her hands. Imagines being shot. Undoes and backtracks and isn't, kills another one and teeth in the back of her neck from a growlithe, backtracks and swings her hand to hit the girl before it can be let out. So much is blank and empty and unknown and she avoids that, tries to pick a path she can be sure of. And in her mind she runs into dead ends over and over and over again.

Because she imagines getting to the door. Imagines opening it with her right hand because the left is a broken mess and her leg is bleeding on the floor.

Imagines dying.

Over and over and over, and it's not a maze it's a wall.

So she tolerates it.

"You're lucky we have some many books here," the girl says.

-

The room is nearly a perfect square, nine by nine feet, a round florescent light above in the center. The lighting is even and unflickering, brightest on the table in the center and fading out at the point of the corners on the floor.

"What went wrong?"

The table is metal, thin. It looks thicker because the sharp edges of it have been bent down and then turned inward slightly. It is plain gray, old in the way of something used without being touched. The surface is smooth and free of scratches or distortions. She answers. The only thing is the feet, rubber capped and marked, worn in places and scuffs on the sides, the material aged enough to begin to degrade regardless of how little it is used.

The floor is different, tile and she could see thin lines where some had shifted and separated. The tile is light colored, white with spots of pastel, and the lines are marked now in the brown-black of dirt tracked in, that had filled them

The chairs are metal too. Folding chairs. She can feel the way the joints move and resist sitting on hers, the rust there. Her hands in her lap, his on the table. The tips of her fingers touch the edge of the chair, sharp like the table. The feeling is like cold without actually being it.

There's more talking: "You think that's good enough?!"

The tile is cold against her face, and her hands as she pushes herself back up. She's barely lifted herself when he kicks her in the chest hard enough to knock her into the wall. There's red where her hands touched, two smudged handprints that streak along the floor from where she first fell to the side of the room.

(She kills him except she doesn't know what's next so she doesn't)

The wall is different from the floor, hard but not as cold against her head. She can smell the residue of disinfectant, faintly, from the last time they were scrubbed. They are also old, but in the way of something scoured many times in the using. By her face she sees reddish brown residue left in a crack between. She starts to stand up, so for a moment she stops touching the wall, but as soon as she moves she's kicked again in the side so she repeats the answer from the ground.

His shoes are steel-tipped and steel-soled. They click on the tile, and are probably partly to blame for the faint scratches she can see from the low angle. His pants are pressed sharply. She can see a gun on one hip.

She is the only one to talk to because everyone but one was dead before she came back (some of that might have been her fault if she had any idea of what "her fault" was supposed to mean) and that one whose blood is on her is probably dead too. Her only understanding of fixing things was trying to make them look the way they had before, which worked for binding broken fingers so no one would see but probably not for someone else shot a few times. She assumed this because of the blood all over her when she'd helped the last one back and because she did not generally assume what was true for her was true for anyone else. No one had ever taught her what else to do.

She'd tried because she'd wanted someone else to talk. It hadn't worked.

He has a gun but she can't pay attention to it. It won't really be fired (her thoughts wander around to find it firing after she attacks him but doesn't hurt him or maim him or do any real damage at all, and then pulling back and waiting as while he pulls it from his holster, something she'd have to do, on purpose, so it doesn't count as really) so it might as well not be there, and she sees it like that, too, for a second, before her attention slides off him entirely.

The door is metal, which she hasn't touched but knows is a different kind of cold, a pulling, spreading cold that fades to warmth with patience, knows just as clearly as she sees the color, bright gray clean but not polished to a shine. It is the strongest part of the room. Odd because she knows where she is and that the back wall leads to a different kind of room where the door is not only flimsy but unwatched, which is the better way to run. She thinks the back wall seems thinnest even though it's the one she would try to break first.

He speaks but she can't pay attention to it. She watches the pattern of scratches carved shallowly into the muted colors of the tile to see if some colors have more than others. They don't and she wonders at this, if color doesn't matter or if it's only that they were the same this time. She repeats her answer again. If the floor is white dyed in places or made of different pieces.

He kicks her but she can't pay attention to it. The scratches are so shallow she can't feel them under her fingers while she's still, lying holding herself halfway up, paused between lying and sitting. He speaks and she answers and he hurts her. There are scratches on the ground and old blood in the cracks in the walls, and the door is newer than the rest, like someone broke out sometime only she doesn't think anyone did, the scratches of grit and the blood of things like this, no more, and the light is not quite steady, growing and dimming so slightly as power shifts but so far from flickering. She wonders if he could see it or if it's another thing she should never say.

Maybe it was another room where something happened that made them replace the doors, she thinks finally.

He grabs her by her hair and pulls her upright, fingers tangled in it, and this brings her back to herself clearly. She doesn't like it. It's threatening.

"Is that all you can say?" he screams at her. "Maybe I should kill you if you're so worthless!"

She repeats her answer again.

He throws her against the door, and it feels just as she knew it did, which isn't surprising because she knew. And she slumps against it and then it opens and she half falls out, rolling to all fours and then standing again cautiously.

He orders her back to the room with the others.

"You got lucky this time," he tells her, and it's a lie.

-

"It's not my blood," she says immediately when the door opens and she sees their faces. "Robert was shot." If she were someone else they would have known, would have been calm enough to see it is her hands and arms that are covered like she was holding someone else as he bled. She's not someone else to them.

She wants them dead because of that. But she's exhausted and hungry and the noise of the world is whispered after the shots, and she can't even hold the thought in her mind now.

"I heard they were mad," says one of the girls. "You're lucky they didn't rough you up badly."

She hears the words, even translates them to meaning. Anything more is almost beyond her, and she doesn't respond, walking past the girls, around the table and toward the door leading to the showers. She slides the door open, steps inside, and shuts it again.

She strips off her clothing and washes the blood off, hers and his and the rest of them. Two of the shots had gone through cleanly and she'd already dug the third bullet out of her left shoulder. One leg was torn open by a pokemon's teeth and ripped when she kicked too hard. The edges of the wounds have sealed already, and the muscle has started to reattach. Her right arm has a bad burn from almost wrist to shoulder, and she claws the dead flesh off without hesitation.

Nothing lasting at all.

One of the others had been shot in the back of his head, and she'd watched the front half of his face come away.

Lucky.

-

He was sitting there, a hazy blur behind a hazy blur surrounded by a hazy blur. She blinked and cocked her head and walked around to see better, but it all stayed a dull smudge. It was not like a film over her eyes. It was like a film draped across the world, turning it into blots of smoke. She put her hand into the blur and touched flat cool wood, hard and polished with a sharp edge, running her fingers along to the corner. She hadn't seen, so she couldn't see.

"I want them," she said.

"No." She heard a chair scrape against smooth tile, the blur loom. She can feel the memory of the coolness in the tips of her fingers from when she'd bent to pull the pokeball from his hand as it lay against the ground. The man she couldn't see walked toward her.

"Give them to me. I want them," she said.

"You just got lucky," the thing told her.

"Lucky," the girl told her. "You're lucky."

The child hadn't said: "I don't want to be lucky."

The girl hadn't said: "Then make your luck."

"Give them to me. I want them," she said.

"You shouldn't even be alive," the blur said. It filled her vision. She could hear it looming close. "You should have died."

She was brushing the hair back from her face and then against the stone. "No."

"You should have died then. And then. And then."

The others were dead and she could barely hear; it was just the boy bigger than her and the gun, shaking as if cold. "No. Not like that."

She was brushing the hair back from her face and the thing she couldn't see hit her and she was flat against the ground, cold against her face. And she stood. "Give them to me. I want them."

"You got lucky."

"That time. Give them to me. I want them."

"You got lucky."

"No."

He had seen her and followed her and she might have lost him but hadn't, cornered in a dead end.

Luck.

"No. Give them to me. I want them."

"It was luck. This time I don't."

She reached out into the blur and grabbed it, feeling cloth and then flesh and then the wet of blood, and she pulled open and could feel the warm steam on her face as guts tumbled out.

"Lucky."

"No."

"Aren't you lucky," said the girl.

"I don't want to be lucky," the child hadn't said.

"Then don't be," the girl hadn't said.

She reached out and grabbed, feeling cloth and flesh and blood. She ran. She hid. She brushed the hair out of her face, the door opened and the woman shot, she stood there calm and still and the boy did anyway, past seeing, and the boy didn't and the door opened and the woman let her out and she brushed the hair from her face and woke on stone. Luck.

"You should be dead," the girl said.

She was brushing the hair from her face. She was brushing the hair from her face. She was brushing the hair from her face.

"I'm still learning."

"You should be dead."

"I'm still learning."

"Aren't you lucky," the girl said.

"I'm still learning," the child said.


	15. Monster

"A kid?" The speaker was scarcely sixteen and certainly not thought much of by the higher ranked. He seemed unaware of this.

"Knock it off, David," said the girl. She was also sixteen. She bent down so that her eyes were closer to level with the child's, who considered the move a poor one - she'd put her face within range of the child's nails. "Just ignore him."

"I don't want some stupid kid screwing up," he said. "She screws up I'm blowing her head off."

"Don't be scared, he's just saying that," the girl said. "Just ignore him," she said again.

"Scared," the child repeated. "I'm not."

"We don't need some useless kid!" He looked to the seventeen year old in appeal.

The seventeen year old shrugged. "We don't need some useless kid," he agreed. "But we have some useless kid for some reason, so just go with it. No point getting worked up. If she screws up we can just ditch her."

"Just ignore them," the girl said. "Just follow along with me and you'll be fine."

-

"How long have you been here?" the girl asked not much later. "I see they gave you pokemon. They okay ones?"

The child considered, nodded just enough for it to be a nod without really moving her eyes. "Yes," she said. "My pokemon. They're okay ones."

The girl smiled, looked relieved, looked like she wasn't entirely convinced that what she'd worried about wasn't true and not completely relieved really. "That's good. Sometimes they - well, they wouldn't, not to a kid, I'm sure. Not that we'd really need anything like that for this. Tell me - did, did anyone tell you why you were going with us?"

_Prove you're useful do something right don't screw this up or you'll get cut into parts you worthless little brat do you understand me_

"Yes," the child said again. "They told me."

The boy driving yelled back, "Having a fun chat? God, Marie, why you feel the need to - !"

"Don't be suck a jerk. Wasn't so long ago you were just like her, don't forget. Or you going to try to pretend you were never scared. That you didn't - "

"Shut up!"

"Chill." The seventeen year old was still placid. "Just focus on the task at hand."

"Maybe you should be telling Marie that," said the sixteen year old sourly.

"Maybe you shouldn't be causing trouble. Just drive. This isn't supposed to be anything big, it doesn't matter if there's a kid or not unless one of us takes leave of our sanity and we decide to put her in charge of disabling all the alarms, okay? She stays in back and she won't cause any trouble." He twisted in his seat, looked back at them, said, "Right, kid? You understand?"

"I understand," she said.

-

The building was large and a bit sprawling, two stories and no higher despite its size. The windows were dark, made of a heavy-looking glass. The grounds around it were well-kept, the grass somewhat think but a rich green.

The moon above had only a narrow sickle of glowing white. The rest was a pretty dark over the stars, dull with spots like old velvet, and the child felt pleased by it.

The three others noticed none of this, not even her inattention. At the moment the oldest was bent by the door, fussing with a mess of wires he'd exposed after disemboweling the card scanner by the door. After some fiddling, the door unlocked and they pushed it open. The child followed them without needing to be told.

Inside, the floor wasn't that hard, a type of fake-linoleum that couldn't support too much weight. It seemed a bad choice to the child. The corridors were overly wide and the doors were arranged a bit irregularly.

The others were silent and tense. The eldest was mumbling almost silently to himself, too soft for the others to hear. He must have been told the number of doors he needed to pass, because he was reciting words as he passed them under his breath, ten, eleven, twelve...

He came to the room he wanted, and he grabbed the knob and twisted it.

The child heard the clunk of metal hitting something - locked. He breathed in sharply and started to look around and she realized the door was not supposed to be locked.

She heard a gun cock. All of them heard the jenny say, "Don't move."

She was too small for the jenny to consider a threat. She slid sideways while the jenny was focused on the others to be less noticeable and while the jenny was saying things that didn't matter she grabbed one of her pokeballs and opened it.

There was a burst of light, a scream, a charred smell. She stepped back into the light and between them and the houndoom. Her first impulse had always been to recall them as her first impulse had always been to hide, but she'd learned it only made things worse in this sort of situations. People reacted badly to what they'd only half-seen.

She was in the way. That prevented any immediate response. Behind her she held her hand flat with spread fingers like the sign for stop and obediently the houndoom sat and waited, looking calm.

The boy swore. But the two of them offered no challenge, so he turned to the girl. "And this!" he demanded.

They'd seen enough. The child recalled the houndoom and continued waiting.

"That was a jenny," hissed the girl. The child was unsure what to make of her voice, recognizing but not understanding the sound. "A jenny. Do you actually care about anything else? _We were almost caught by a jenny._"

"If you're given a vase, you don't start looking for cracks," the other boy said, his voice similar. "Let's just move. That might not be the only one." But he didn't move immediately, instead turning to the child. "Listen, ignore him. It doesn't matter what he says. You did a good thing, you understand? A very good thing. You see a monster like it again, you do the same thing. It doesn't matter if you're supposed to have them or not. We don't care. Okay?"

"Okay," she assured him, not quite understanding.

They stepped over the blackened bits. They were acting different than others had when something like this had happened with a guard. The child wondered if they understood something like she did about the jennies.

"What do we do now?" the girl said.

"I - think that was the only one. Maybe," the seventeen year old said, very slowly. "Let's get this done. If we hurry we should be able to get out before anyone else realizes."

"And if not?"

"Then let's hope the next ones die as easily. Look, they'll just send us back here! You have any idea what we'd face the second time around? So move. You're the lockpicker."

The girl nodded, bent by the doorknob. It was a simple lock and didn't take long before the child heard the lock shift. They headed inside.

The boy flipped the lights on but the room remained dim. Huge cylinder-shaped glass tanks filled the space. The three walked in through a center corridor, staying as far away from the tanks on either side as possible.

The child felt no such compulsion. Seeing they'd forgotten about her, she went up to one of the cylinders to get a better look. It was filled with blue liquid. As her eyes adjusted, she could see something floating in the center.

The child didn't recognize it but she guessed there was something wrong about it from the lack of symmetry, the lumps and bulges that jutted out haphazardly to create an irregular ball of flesh. She placed her hands flat against the thick glass, feeling the faintest of vibrations through it that made her think the liquid inside was flowing through rapidly.

She watched for a few minutes. **The thing inside is dead**, she thought.

The other children were in the center of the room, the sixteen year old tapping at the keys of a mammoth computer. The child knew little of computers and was no interested in learning more - she found them, by large, useless to her, made for holding information concretely that became hazed and uncertain in their minds, and she hated the sounds they made.

"Have you found it yet?" hissed the girl, voice tight.

"I'm looking! This isn't even the right computer, the one we should have gone to is an administrative - "

"Might not have what they wanted, and then we'd be in even more trouble. _This thing_ maintains _those things_. It must have the chemical lists."

"Yeah, yeah, but it doesn't necessarily know it has them." There was quiet, and the child moved to several different cylinders in turn.

"Got it!" the sixteen year old said at last. He took out a shiny disk and shoved it into a slot. "Just need to copy - " The computer rumbled a bit, then spat out the shiny disk again, looking the same as before. "That should be all of it."

"Okay," the oldest boy said, more to himself than anything. He swallowed quietly - the child saw his throat move - then breathed in deliberate and slow, like he was about to do something he wasn't sure of, or didn't want to do, but was about to do anyway. "Okay." The sixteen year old had stood, and he grabbed the back of the chair before the computer, lifted it and then smashed it into the nearest glass tube. It shattered. Blue liquid gushed out over the jagged edge of the remaining glass, and without that support, the fleshy lump in the center detached from the tubes and wires connected to it and tumbled out after it.

It was nothing more than an irregular ball of meat, with the dead but not yet rotted look of something like a steak. Also like a steak, it had nothing the child could identify as skin over the surface, though it lacked the differentiation and grain she associated with muscle. Out of the blue liquid, it collapsed somewhat under its own weight, the bottom flattening out.

The one in the next tube burst when it hit the floor, filling the air with the smell of decomposition. The child stared at it with interest. It had possessed a covering of skin that had broken open to expose large areas of liquefaction inside. Other sections of the flesh were still solid and twitched slightly in the air.

The next two cylinders contained nothing visible, but the one inside the third flopped weakly in the thin sheen of fluid covering the floor until the sixteen year old shot it, twice, with the gun he'd taken from the dead jenny.

A few other the others broke apart completely out of the liquid, splattering the floor in red goop. Another seemed to corrode in the air, and a third was a mass of colorless strands, like a collapsed spiderweb.

The child had crouched down on all fours by one of the more intact balls, fascinated. It was pulsing like a heart but she couldn't hear anything like a heartbeat even close up to it. Her arms were crossed under her, liquid soaking up through the cloth. It stung a bit where it touched her skin but not enough to be worrying.

There was another gunshot and the thing exploded, splattering her face with more red gunk. She twisted to look toward the sound and the boy and her eyes caught the faint light as she did so for just an instant.

"Are you okay?" said the girl, who turned to see her a second after, covered in red. She ran over.

The child wiped at her face with one hand. "I'm fine," she said, watching as the gun was aimed toward her.

"Get away from it, Marie," the sixteen year old said.

"What?" She turned, and in profile the child could see her eyes widen. She stepped in front of the child as he decided to shoot and he jerked at the last second so the shot hit her in the arm. The child didn't move in response, as if it had missed completely.

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" she yelled, voice sharp and something.

"Get away from it Marie!" he yelled back, and he was starting to shake. "Get away from it, there's something wrong. It's dangerous, get away from it."

"Stop it!"

"Knock it off, David, this isn't funny," said the oldest one.

"Look at it look at it look at it look at it - " he was repeating, his voice getting hysterical. "Splattered and it doesn't even blink its eyes are wrong didn't you see they're wrong they're _silver_ that's not a kid Marie it's not a kid - it's not - " The hands holding the gun were shaking too badly to aim it even though Marie was too distracted and confused to be paying attention to where she was standing and the child's side was exposed.

It didn't matter, because they were both telling him to calm down. Because they were both telling him he was seeing things, he was losing it and he needed to trust them and put the gun down. And he couldn't act in the face of their certainty.

"It's not a kid it's not," he kept repeating. "Look at it look at its eyes it's not a kid." And the seventeen year old walked slowly up until he grabbed the gun and pulled it out of the other boy's trembling fingers.

"Don't you understand it's tricking you," he said desperately, almost pleading. "It's tricking you it's not a kid."

But they hadn't seen, and faced with their certainty he couldn't cling to what he'd seen with his own eyes as fact.

He didn't kill her. He couldn't kill her as long as the others still believed she was only a child.

-

The child's arm was still hurting.

She was back in the room with the others. She was sitting on a bed in the back looking at the others silently, and the pain in her arm was growing. She rolled the sleeve up to her shoulder. The gunshot wound had sealed over. The skin under had swelled up and was the wrong color, flushed reddish-yellow, which seemed to be spreading through the flesh of her arm.

She bit into it. It tasted of sickness, blood, rot and chemical stinging. Liquid oozed out, a yellowy blue mix with fragments of muscle. She bit again, pulling it further open.

There was a noise. One of them had noticed her for some reason, and now the girl came over and was touching her arm and making more noise: "Oh my god what happened."

The child was still relatively mobile, and anyway, the girl was staring at her arm with the sympathy-hurt expression and not really seeing her, so she accepted being tugged about and the girls trying to clean the wound and putting something else stinging on it without objection. She tolerated it being bandaged. Later, when they weren't paying attention to her again, she pulled the bandage off again. Her skin hadn't sealed over yet. It was weeping something whitish and thicker than water. She licked it a few times, cleaning some of the stinging-stuff residue off, then pulled the sleeve down again.


	16. Kind

I think I'm going to give up on chronological order for this story. Strictly speaking, this chapter comes after the last one. Whether or not future chapters will take place between this chapter and the last I'm not sure.

I've been trying my best, but the problem is this story isn't being written chronologically, and I often run into a lot of trouble trying to fit the pieces together. Simply posting pieces should allow me to update this a lot faster.

If you're strongly opposed to this idea and would prefer chronological order, you'd best speak up.

* * *

"Hey, kiddo."

Kiddo…

She looked at him, her expression blank and waiting. She hadn't been paying much attention to what was ahead of her. What was behind had been too much more important. Now she paused. Blood pooled behind her fingers, ran down her ankle.

"You hurt?" His eyes had caught on a droplet for an instant, then reversed direction to stare at her right arm, where she was holding it with her other hand. "Come here, I'll help you."

The child paused a moment more, heard voices in the distance, and stepped forward, into the lighted doorway.

He shut the door behind firmly, pushing it until the lock clicked into place. His posture didn't suggest a threat. He meant the door to keep things out. At the moment, the child agreed with that idea. And the child was older than she had been, so the three small rooms she was locked into were not as dangerous as they would have been. Even still, it helped that the walls were flimsy.

She was maneuvered over to a small round table, careful not to limp. He took out a dull white box from a drawer and placed that on top, then stretched out her arm over the wood. She curled her fingers under by habit, so that they and not her palm were against the surface, keeping the claws out of sight. And his breath hissed in softly in a sound she recognized as sympathy, and she wondered why people were like that.

"This might hurt," he said, the hint of it in his voice as if the thought alone could be painful. He was uncapping a bottle, filling the room with the smell of alcohol, and then he pressed a patch of cotton fiber over the top and upended the bottle quickly. The sloshing sound was quiet – the bottle must have been mostly full, although the plastic was opaque and the child could not tell by sight. She saw his hand tremble once, very slightly, and then he dabbed at the raw skin. His eyes were focused there, as if he didn't want to look at her in the face. Only when he finished did he. "Sorry," he said then, replacing the bottle and standing.

He was curious, in the way that tied to sympathy. "What happened to you?" he asked, turning on the metal faucet over the metal sink.

"Scratched." She did not know the name, but that was what he asked next, so she said, "Something. It might have been a pokemon."

He looked at her. After a moment, "At Gine Labs?" He had wet a cloth.

"In there."

"Anyone with you?"

**They and I scattered**, she thought. "We scattered," she said.

He placed the cloth carefully over the injury, then began to press it gingerly into place, piece by piece. It would have been less painful to have put it on quickly, but she could see in his movement he did not want it to hurt. "They okay?"

"I don't know."

"They leave you?"

"Sort of," she said, because there were not good words for leaving chaos where one could not stand and wait for long, but not where one had to run blindly.

"Sort of," he repeated, without the intonation of a question. But he looked at her and waited.

"There wasn't much time to group together. But, they didn't care if I made it out or not. So I went a different way."

"Sorry." He pressed his fingers on the underside of her arm and she lifted it. He began wrapping it up with a dry bandage, pulling it tighter in the first sure movements he had made. Perhaps because the wound was covered now.

"It doesn't matter." She tossed her head the way she understood was appropriate, not caring in which way he took it.

And it worked halfway, although he did not drop the subject entirely. There was silence a few moments. "They going to look for you?"

"I'm supposed to meet back up with them on my own."

"You're going to?"

"Why not." She did not want the impression she was asking him.

Sirens came through the thin and flimsy walls, painful enough to make her want to cover her ears. They seemed louder than usual. Everything did. Her arm was bleeding, her leg was bleeding, her head ached. Whatever had been on the claws, it was potent.

"That's rather fatalistic of you." When she didn't answer but only pulled her arm back into her lap, he said, "So why did you go in there anyway?"

"Told to."

"You just did it because someone said to? Your friends?" His voice was unhurried, as if he didn't want to upset her with questioning. "Or – were you going with your friends?"

"This wasn't a…" The child considered. "Something done without thought. By kids who just decided. Has it happened like that?"

"I heard about it. Because of the secrecy around the place, they must have thought something amazing or important was inside. They didn't get out that time. Accidental, overuse of force. I heard on the news. The security there made a mistake." He was silent a moment. "What was your group then? Were you…did you join up with some adult gang?"

She did not like the possessive. "The group was Rocket," she said, rephrasing it.

"You…don't have a uniform." His statement was hesitant rather than disbelieving.

"Plenty of times, they don't wear uniforms."

"Jesus. I didn't think they used kids." Then: "Sorry. That's who you're heading back to?" She didn't bother answering. "That why they left you?"

Someone who'd probably die anyway, who'd be too intimidated to be angry and too inexperienced to retaliate even if they were. Someone who wouldn't be missed. A kid. "Pretty much."

"Jesus." He looked off to the side, then down at the table, where her blood had puddled. Under the table a second pool was forming as the cloth around her leg became soaked. He was silent. Her ears could not pick up anything that sounded like what had been pursuing her.

"You guys have doctors?"

"It'll heal," she said instead.

"Will they take you to a doctor?" When she didn't answer, he said, "You need to go to the hospital. I –"

"No."

"I'll take you. They won't turn you in."

"No."

"I don't know medicine. You need –"

"No."

He deflated. "You've got to do something," he said, without conviction.

She didn't answer this, and he looked away again. He was silent again. Then: "Why did…can you tell me why you joined?"

"There aren't many who join," she said. "And I wasn't one of them."

"But you're going back."

"Why not," she said again.

"You don't have to, you know." When she didn't speak, he continued, "There are other options."

"I didn't have to run here," she told him. "There are a lot of things that are only options in that they're possible."

"You could go to a jenny."

"No."

"Why?"

"There are a lot of things that are only options in that they're possible," she repeated. "I could have stepped in front of a car earlier. It's the same thing."

"You guys that scared of them?"

She disliked his phrasing. She didn't answer.

"Look, you're…you're just a kid. I don't know what you were told. But the jennies won't try you, not if you're just a kid."

"The jennies don't try anyone who goes to them like that."

"So…"

"No."

"Why?" he said again.

"I know what happens."

He closed his eyes, looked like he was in pain. "That what they tell you?"

"I know because I saw." When he looked like he didn't believe her, she said, "There was screaming."

And he was silent.

"Are you hungry?" he asked at last. "I don't have anything much, but…"

She nodded, and he stood and walked to the refrigerator, opened it. It was small but still half empty. From it, he took out a yellowish block, wrapped in plastic. He placed it on the false-stone counter and got a plate and knife, then brought all three back to the table. "Sorry," he said, cutting open the cheese and then slicing it. "I don't usually eat at home."

"It's fine." She took one of the chunks with her right hand and bit into it.

"Do you have pokemon?" he asked after a moment. "You've got a belt."

"We split up."

"Them too?" His voice was sad.

She understood what he meant, so she swallowed the cheese and said, "No. We'd already split up, before we ran, and there wasn't time to get back together."

"Think they're okay?"

"We all got out." She saw his expression, but did not try to explain she was not saying it because she wanted it to be true. The blood had saturated the bandage on her arm and was soaking into her lap. She took another piece.

"What are their names?"

"Slice. Apocalypse. Eclipse. The other two don't have names yet."

He half-smiled. "Cheery names." She didn't respond. "Any names you're thinking of, for the last two?"

"I don't name them. It's what they were called."

"Other people named them?"

"That's what a name is."

"What's your name?"

"People call me ice sometimes."

He smiled at that as well. "Do they all pick nicknames like that?"

"People call me that. We don't pick names. You can decide my name is something else, it doesn't matter to me."

"Like it didn't matter they left you."

"Like that."

His expression was sad. She took another chunk of cheese.

"What are they, the ones that don't have names?"

"A scyther and a larvitar."

"Larvitar? I don't know that one."

She touched her left hand to the tabletop, then raised it. "This big. Stands like a charmander. Rock type. Green with black."

"And the others?"

A car's headlights flashed through the window, burning into her eyes. Across from her, the man's expression shifted. The child reached for the knife he had used for the cheese and shoved it through his throat. She moved the plate so that the blood wouldn't splatter on it and resumed eating.


End file.
